Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances

Oh, I don't keep a journal. How you remember an incident is dictated by your emotional state at the time. How you receive the information that is coming in is definitely based on your history and who you are.

You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.

We're all building our narratives in our heads.

To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.

Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.

Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so.

Everybody is a hero in their own story if you just look.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.