Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate

When I was younger, I'd be like 'Would you like to go to dinner' and the girl would be like 'Meh.' But then I was like 'Do you want to go with me for a drink somewhere?' and she'd be like 'Okay.'

I don't care if my jokes are appropriate for a kid.

I don't think men talk as much as women, but when we have something on our minds we'll get it out.

Women tell stories; men want answers. Guys get impatient when we drone on forever; we get frustrated when they tune out.

I try to gauge whether a girl likes me before I make a move. I would write a page-long note to a girl. If she wrote a whole page back, I knew she liked me, too. If she wrote back like two words, then I figured I'd move on.

You can tell a lot about a woman by her email signature. Actually you can't but for some reason people do anyway.

When men sit around and talk, they are very competitive. One person will tell an anecdote and the next person will try to top that. When you get six women together, they share a lot more. They will be far more interested in what the other person has to say. The conservation is more interactive and less about individually showing off.

The world is so mysterious, and there's so many social interactions where I have no idea what I'm supposed to do - what's being asked of me, what's expected of me.

One of the things that women really excel at is reading and reacting to subtle cues. We've always had to do that because men don't have to.

Every Bond is different and every generation needs a different Bond and it's been able to move with the times.

It has been more than 60 years since the constitution was put in place. There are provisions in the constitution that no longer suit the times. Since the constitution was promulgated, we've seen the emergence of new values, such as privacy, the environment and so on, which need to be incorporated.

Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book.... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance.

Let's have an honest conversation about what's going on. A man and a man at a bar looks like mentoring. A man and a woman at a bar looks like dating.

There's always a source for humor [in politics]. If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny. So it sort of selects itself. It has to. And plus, often something that wouldn't be funny at the time is okay to make jokes about later.

A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.

At the end of the day, flirting is a pretty universal language. Americans are more direct. British people are more indirect about everything

I don't want to go around making everyone else agree with me. I don't feel the need to do that.

Listen to what people say about themselves; they will tell you everything you need to know.

Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself.

I can be very polite, and I think that people can confuse that for all sorts of things... But I'll take that over people assuming that I'm smart just because I'm short and rude.

It was pretty obvious Lena wanted to be asked. Another mysterious thing about girls- they want to be asked to stuff even if they don't want to go.

So perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people sound when they speak - the actual words and expressions they employ - than to what they mean. This notion of dialogue as a pure expression of character that...transcends the specifics of time and place may be partly why the conversations in the works of writers such as Austen and Bronte often sound fresh and astonishingly contemporary.

Nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it.

It's a weird age. They're like, 'Amy, I'm pregnant.' And I still don't know whether to be like, 'Congratulations,' or 'Do you need a ride?