Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.

It was nice to be in my own country, where I didn't need a translator or a driver. Where I didn't need to figure out cultural references or what hijab I needed to wear to cover my hair.

There are some in our region, especially among the Arabs, who do not respect their own identity and culture, and who are dazzled by the West in an unlimited and unobjective manner

We cannot just ape the west. What may be good in an alien country may be unpalatable in India.

I was told many times that my writing was either too Korean - or not Korean enough.

I'm not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

Most of my life I was occupied with American television and American food. My ethnicity was my choice. It still is.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

The first 10 years of my life, I lived as 'Matangi.' When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name. My auntie came from Europe to visit us, and she was like, 'Just call yourself something else.'

My mum and dad were speaking all the time about, 'In Sudan we do this,' and 'In Egypt we do that,' so I was very aware of cultural differences. I was confused growing up; it gave me a feeling of being an outsider watching others. But I think this is good for a writer.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

When I was growing up, I despised Irishness. I felt our music, our television and our books were just poor imitations of what came out of Britain and America. I was all set to abandon it entirely.

My closest friends from Israel make fun of me for becoming an American, and my American friends make fun of how Israeli I am... I can't win.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.

I think Brits probably feel that Americans are more like us than vice-versa, if that makes sense. Because we get everything American over here in Britain, but yet there are things which are staunchly English that you guys don't have.

Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.

Having uncritically accepted [Western] culture in everything, we now find we have lost our hold on the autonomous ideals of the Japanese race.

China is a company of contradictions. Nothing is what it appears to be. We have to be extremely respectful when we go overseas.

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners

We are Martians who have come to earth to change everything—and we are afraid we will not be so well received. So we try to keep it a secret, try to appear as Americans…But that we could not do because of our accent. So we settled in a country nobody ever has heard about and now we are claiming to be Hungarians.

… the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of western peoples, instead of the most westerly of easterns, that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle.

American audiences and European and Asian audiences are so different.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself 'the American' at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.