Kazuo Ishiguro talks about the pandemic, his novel ?Klara and the Sun,? fatherhood and more.

A: Like everybody, I’ve been missing company because of the pandemic and so on. Often I would have been getting up looking forward to some event, I’d be seeing somebody I want to see. I love conversations with strangers, with old friends, with members of my family. A conversation is something that always excites me because it’s always going to open up something new. We have had a lot to think about recently, not just about the pandemic, but about where we’re going as a society in the Western world. We’ve had many, many challenging things, and some of that you might think is depressing, but — I hate to say this, it feels in rather bad taste — but that’s kind of what gets me up in the morning. I think, “I’m going to find out more about this. I’m reading this, and this book is fascinating, and these ideas here are fascinating.” Some awful things have happened in the last year or so, and people have lost a lot of loved ones, but these are not uninteresting times.