"Sometimes people base their whole lives on a sincerely held belief that could be wrong. That's what my early books are about: people who think they know. But there is no Socrates figure. They are their own Socrates.
There's a passage in one of Plato's dislogues in which Socrates says that idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times. Plato suggests it can be like that with the search for the meaning of the good. You shouldn't get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All you have discovered is that the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching."
From Kazuo Ishuguro's The Paris Review interview (Spring 2008)
How was the Remains of the Day named
I was at a writers' festival in Australia, sitting on a beach with Michael Ondaatje, Victoria Glendinning, Robert McCrum, and a Dutch writer named Judith Hertzberg. We were playing a semi-serious game of trying to find a title for my soon-to-be-completed novel. Michael Ondaatje suggested Sirloin: A Juicy Tale. It was on that level. I kept explaining that it had to do with this butler. Then Judith Hertzberg mentioned a phrase of Freud's, Tagesreste, which he used to refer to dreams, which is something like "debris of the day." When she translated it off the top of her head, it came out as "remains of the day." It seemed to me right in terms of atmosphere.
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