Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

I think that so many people don't understand how easy it is to be broke, how easy it is to find yourself in a situation where you're in an absolutely foreign place.

I am definitely not rich.

No, I'm not wealthy.

The fellow that has no money is poor. The fellow that has nothing but money is poorer still.

I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.

False shame accompanies a man that is poor, shame that either harms a man greatly or profits him; shame is with poverty, but confidence with wealth.

Youth is the best time to be rich, and the best time to be poor.

We definitely weren't poor growing up, but we weren't rich.

I wasn't rich.

Many people come here and they think my apartment is a poor relative to my name. But you cannot be radical and have money, it’s impossible.

Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.

Ultimately, I think people are so hopeful for having some joy in life that is really hard to find. You can't make a living, and the idea of doing one small bank robbery or something, just trying to find your way in a life, finding your footing and ending up behind bars.

Being poor is a state of mind, not a condition.

I just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can't get out. And so I'm impatient with those who think that it's easy for people to get out of trouble.

We think of poverty as a condition simply meaning a lack of funds, no money, but when one sees fifth, sixth, and seventh generation poor, it is clear that poverty is as complicated as high finance.

I understand that people might be poor if they don't have any work, but I don't accept that someone is poor if they've worked really hard.

I've had two great years, probably five good years. So I had 20 years of just kind of uncertainty and suffering and ego destruction and poverty. All these things. There's no way I'm ever going to catch up to the misery years. It's impossible... If I don't do anything dumb or I don't get a disease or something, and then I've got to five to eight years I think where it'll really be great and then it will start to degenerate like uranium, you know?

He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

I still have the mentality of someone who doesn't know where he's going to sleep and doesn't know if he has enough money for gas to get to the next job interview. I don't think that mentality ever leaves, you know?

...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.

You never know how you'll turn out till you've been down to half a dollar and no prospects.

In the affairs of this world, poverty alone is without envy.

You're either in a position of abundance or you're in a position of poverty. Now, that's every area of your life. That's not just financially.

The one thing I've found you really can't joke about - and people think it's death or something - is money. No one thinks it's funny, whether you have it or you don't. Money is just something no one seems to like joking about.

Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.