Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

I've been very lucky with prizes. But the thing about prizes is that, when you talk about a prize-winning author, you can be talking about one that is well-regarded but doesn't sell any books.

You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

As an author, I love to know my book sells really well.

Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.

I have grown into a Bestsellasaurus Rex - a big, stumbling book-beast that is loved when it shits money and hated when it tramples houses... I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them.

On the strength of Vonnegut's reputation, 'Breakfast of Champions' spent a year on the best-seller lists, proving that he could indeed publish anything and make money.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better.

Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

My first book was the most successful debut novel in the U.K. ever and every one of my books has reached number one in the U.K. Clearly the British know brilliance when they see it.

Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still... you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt.

The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

If you don't make the best-seller list, if you don't get shortlisted for any prizes, it's goodbye.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

If I can hit No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, I'm thinking of having the entire list tattooed on my body somewhere. It would be fabulous.

Heinlein never had a best-seller. Even, I think, with Stranger in a Strange Land, I don't think it was actually on the New York Times best seller list.

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.

I have tons of fans in Canada. I've sold hundreds of thousands of books there.

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.