Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on and many that I had no control over whatsoever.

You write your life story by the choices you make. You never know if they have been a mistake. Those moments of decision are so difficult.

I think it's natural as you get to the end of your twenties to start thinking about what you could have done differently - whether they went well or whether they went terribly.

I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.

Knowing what I know now and what I have been through, would I do it the same? I look at the alternative - a very simple life. It would have been nice to have a simple life.

One of the most important things that I have learned in my 57 years is that life is all about choices. On every journey you take, you face choices. At every fork in the road, you make a choice. And it is those decisions that shape our lives.

If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.

I don't have a seller's remorse about how I've lived.

You can never regret anything you do in life. You kind of have to learn the lesson from whatever the experience is and take it with you on your journey forward.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

So many roads. So many detours. So many choices. So many mistakes.

If I had my life to live over, I would want to be a man.

I don't regret any decisions I've made in my life.

By definition, an actor's life is a recipe for regret. There are always roads you could have taken. But I've lived long enough to realise that each road has its own rewards.

How many crossroads are you allowed to have in life? I seem to have a lot of crossroads. I think maybe I crossed back across the same road too often.

As you get older, you start to really ask questions like, 'Is this the road I should be walking down?,' because every decision seems more final, as you get older.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably live the same way.

Do I regret how my life turned out? Of course not - not for a single second.

If I could travel through time, I wouldn't go back and change anything in my life, because I'm delighted with the way it's turned out.

You can never predict what the specific shape of your life is going to be, and you won't really know its general shape until, God willing, you're advanced in years and you have the time and opportunity to look back in a coherent way and see what your life was about.

If I had my whole life to live over again, I don't think I'd have the strength.

I think life is a matter of choices and that wherever we are, good or bad, is because of choices we make.

Sometimes you get to a place in life where you feel you've made some choices, and maybe they weren't the right choices, and that it's all coming to an end.

For the first half of your life, people tell you what you should do; for the second half, they tell you what you should have done.

Life is an aggregate of experience, which continually surprises us.