Quote of the Day (Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, on the ‘Big Overlap Between Fiction and Song’)

“I've been writing songs since age 15, and for me there's always been a big overlap between fiction and song. My style as a novelist comes substantially from what I learnt writing songs. The intimate, first-person quality of a singer performing to an audience, for instance, carried over for me into novels. As did the need to approach meaning subtly, sometimes by nudging it into the spaces between the lines. You have to do that all the time when writing lyrics for someone to sing.” — Japanese-born British Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day), interviewed for “By the Book,” The New York Times Book Review, Mar. 8, 2015