35 Inspirational Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes On Success

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL is a British novelist, screenwriter and short-story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to England in 1960 when he was five. Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world. He has received four Man Booker Prize nominations and won the award in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was named by Time as the best novel of the year and was included in the magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded Ishiguro the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing him in its citation as a writer “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. May these Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.” Kazuo Ishiguro

2. “I want my words to survive translation.” Kazuo Ishiguro

3. “I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.” Kazuo Ishiguro

4. “Your life must now run the course that’s been set for it.” Kazuo Ishiguro

5. “Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator’s memories and thoughts.” Kazuo Ishiguro

6. “I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.” Kazuo Ishiguro

7. “I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.” Kazuo Ishiguro

8. “You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.” Kazuo Ishiguro

9. “I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way – one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.” Kazuo Ishiguro

10. “There’s still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I’m not trying to say I’m not happy with the novels I’ve written in the past. But it always feels to me like there’s another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.” Kazuo Ishiguro

11. “There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life.” Kazuo Ishiguro

12. “The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.” Kazuo Ishiguro

13. “The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.” Kazuo Ishiguro

14. “Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?” Kazuo Ishiguro

15. “What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.” Kazuo Ishiguro

16. “As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.” Kazuo Ishiguro

17. “You’re always in a rush, or else you’re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.” Kazuo Ishiguro

18. “There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.” Kazuo Ishiguro

19. “You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?” Kazuo Ishiguro

20. “After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?” Kazuo Ishiguro

21. “Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.” Kazuo Ishiguro

22. “It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.” Kazuo Ishiguro

23. “What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.” Kazuo Ishiguro

24. “Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one’s development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one’s ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.” Kazuo Ishiguro

25. “Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.” Kazuo Ishiguro

26. “When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.” Kazuo Ishiguro

27. “If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.” Kazuo Ishiguro

28. “We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.” Kazuo Ishiguro

29. “All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow’s sky. That’s what I want now, and I think it’s what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We’ll become too set to change. If we don’t take our chance now, another may never come for either of us.” Kazuo Ishiguro

30. “It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.” Kazuo Ishiguro

31. “I’m interested in memory because it’s a filter through which we see our lives, and because it’s foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.” Kazuo Ishiguro

32. “As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.” Kazuo Ishiguro

33. “Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing, often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.” Kazuo Ishiguro

34. “I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.” Kazuo Ishiguro

35. “Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.” Kazuo Ishiguro

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