Over at the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead interviews Kazuo Ishiguro.

The passage of time does worry him, though, for, until now, he has published a novel only once every five years. By this standard, he smiles, Nocturnes is “a year early – I think because I was so aware of how slowly I was publishing. There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die. And you think, hmm, God, there’s only four left, and so you start,” he laughs, “well – it’s a bit alarming. So I thought I’d better adopt a less leisurely attitude.”

It is often said that Ishiguro is obsessed with the fact that a writer’s best work is produced in their youth, but when I mention this, he says quickly, “Yeah, that’s not quite my obsession so much as Martin Amis’s. He keeps quoting me.”

And then I quote Aitkenhead’s quote of Ishiguro quoting Amis’s quote and so it goes.

By the way, I first read ‘And you think, hmm, God, there’s only four left,’ as ‘And you think, hmm, thank God, there’s only four left.’