top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Memory quotes
"It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France."
"The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh."
"As I looked down at him, as I saw his yellow hair pressed against my coat, I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, with his head thrown back, his rich, flawless voice singing the lilting air of the opera from which we'd only just come, his walking stick tapping the cobblestones in time with the music, his large, sparkling eye catching the young woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as the song died on his lips; and for one moment, that one moment when his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, that passion for merely being alive."
"My memories always clutch my brain to understand the past."
"In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody's memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language."
"It struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be the end of that. Everything that had happened would be sucked away into memory and vapour, as though it hadn't even happened at all."
"Memories are like dreams. You remember how you got to the front of the classroom with no clothes on."
".. I thought about him now and then, the things he had taught me about 'being human' and 'relating to others;, but it was always in the distance, as if from another life.. .. The people who might have told me were long forgotten, their phone numbers buried in some packed-away box in the attic."
Explore more quotes by Kazuo Ishiguro
"As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened."
"Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write."
"I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends."
"I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff."
"People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different."
"There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?"
"I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time."
"The book was at a reasonably high position on the New York Times... before I was in the country. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if my presence here would push it up or down."
bottom of page