Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro OBE, FRSA, FRSLis a British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan; his family moved to England in 1960 when he was five. Ishiguro obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative-writing course in 1980...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth8 November 1954
CountryJapan
chunk few remember
Nagasaki is not just a few hazy images. I remember it as a real chunk of my life.
games
I often play little games in my head.
apart fall fluid fragment fully memory mimicking moves reference scene solid took writer
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. It doesn't have to be fully realized, it can be a glancing, shadowy reference to something that you'll come back to later, and then it moves on.
childhood way england
I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that's vanished - the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.
thinking people might
I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.
book careers people
Throughout my career I've struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I'm less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end.
book fiction relate
I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer.
country strong should-have
Every country should have a strong literary tradition of its own at the center, but it should also have an interest in other countries.
thinking mixtures tokyo
If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.
air secret littles
Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.
memories night childhood
What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.
hurt sorry skulls
It didn't hurt, did it? When I hit you?" "Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot..." "But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I'm awfully sorry. I honestly am.
eye long childhood
I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, and maybe even call.
art soul never-let-me-go
We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.