I have a sense of having just left without saying goodbye, and of this whole other world just kind of fading away. … I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

Conversation with Lewis Burke Frumkes, The Writer, volume 114, number 5, May 2001, collected in Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, p. 189