Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

That reminds me of something that happened to me when I was a kid.

I exist only in the past.

Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

The fragments for the past, for me, are not without life.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

When it comes to jump-starting the intricate machinery of recollection, there's nothing more effective than the scent of approaching death.

I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

I remember everything from 1976. I remember I was 14, and I remember my routines.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

When I write about things, it's a lot to do with sense memory. How things smell and taste can bring incredible memories flooding back and transport you in an instant to another time and place.

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

It's like I'm stuck in a time bubble. Memories keep coming back, and of course, memories are a huge part of literature and cinema, from "Stand by Me" to "Blade Runner."

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.