"I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing." ... 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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from EnglandAcademics from the United KingdomShort story writers from EnglandBooker Prize winnersScreenwriters from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Rukeyser, Rebecca. "Kazuo Ishiguro: Mythic Retreat" guernicamag.com interview. 1 May 2015.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kazuo_Ishiguro
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro (born November 8, 1954) is a British novelist of Japanese descent. In 2017, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
28 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Kazuo Ishiguro →
Related Quotes
"More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's f…"
"I have a sense of having just left without saying goodbye, and of this whole other world just kind of fading away. … …"
"If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and …"
"After all, there's no turning back the clock now. One can't be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should r…"
"It is now some twenty minutes since the man left, but I have remained here on this bench to await the event that has …"
"Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when on…"
"And I'm a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people's backs up."
"Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose."
"It'll come off. If you can't get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody."
"My donors have always tended to do much better than expected."