I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.
Kazuo IshiguroAnd what made these heart-to-hearts possible--you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time--was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we'd honor confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn't use against each other anything we'd talked about during those sessions.
Kazuo IshiguroEvery country should have a strong literary tradition of its own at the center, but it should also have an interest in other countries.
Kazuo IshiguroI really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can't and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody's head.
Kazuo Ishiguro