My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs Quotes

“Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings. That they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides. There are large, glamorous industries around stories; the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“Firstly, we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“In a time of dangerously increasing division, we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“It’s hard to put the whole world to rights, but let us at least think about how we can prepare our own small corner of it, this corner of ‘literature’, where we read, write, publish, recommend, denounce and give awards to books. If we are to play an important role in this uncertain future, if we are to get the best from the writers of today and tomorrow, I believe we must become more diverse. I mean this in two particular senses.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“that all good stories, never mind how radical or traditional their mode of telling, had to contain relationships that are important to us; that move us, amuse us, anger us, surprise us.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“If I could go from one passage to the next according to the narrator’s thought associations and drifting memories, I could compose in something like the way an abstract painter might choose to place shapes and colours around a canvas. I could place a scene from two days ago right beside one from twenty years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two. In such a way, I began to think, I might suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person’s view of their own self and of their past.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“But now, looking back, the era since the fall of the Berlin Wall seems like one of complacency, of opportunities lost. Enormous inequalities – of wealth and opportunity – have been allowed to grow, between nations and within nations. In particular, the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the long years of austerity policies imposed on ordinary people following the scandalous economic crash of 2008, have brought us to a present in which Far Right ideologies and tribal nationalisms proliferate. Racism, in its traditional forms and in its modernised, better-marketed versions, is once again on the rise, stirring beneath our civilised streets like a buried monster awakening. For the moment we seem to lack any progressive cause to unite us. Instead, even in the wealthy democracies of the West, we're fracturing into rival camps from which to compete bitterly for resources or power.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs: The Nobel Lecture

“How could written fiction hope to survive against the might of cinema and television if it didn’t offer something unique, something the other forms couldn’t do?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“Why write a novel if it was going to offer more or less the same experience someone could get by turning on a television?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“It was my wish to re-build my Japan in fiction, to make it safe, so that I could thereafter point to a book and say: ‘Yes, there’s my Japan, inside there.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“When I look back to this period, and remember it was less than twenty years from the end of a world war in which the Japanese had been their bitter enemies, I’m amazed by the openness and instinctive generosity with which our family was accepted by this ordinary English community.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“What this all amounted to was that as I was growing up, long before I’d ever thought to create fictional worlds in prose, I was busily constructing in my mind a richly detailed place called ‘Japan’ – a place to which I in some way belonged, and from which I drew a certain sense of my identity and my confidence.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs