"In 1968, he bought his first Bob Dylan album, 'John Wesley Harding,' and worked backward from there."

"He and his friends would sit around for hours nodding along to Dylan’s obscure lyrics as though they understood every word. It was like a microcosm of adolescence, he told me, pretending to know while knowing nothing. Ishiguro wasn’t just bluffing, though. From Dylan, as well as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, he learned about the possibilities of the first-person: how a character could be summoned into being with just a few words.... 'You probably work harder at your job than I do,' Ishiguro said one evening in early December.... 'Speaking of his comparatively small output, Ishiguro said: 'I don’t have any regrets about it. In some ways, I suppose, I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it’s because writing wasn’t my first choice of profession. It’s almost something I fell back on because I couldn’t make it as a singer-songwriter. It’s not something I’ve wanted to do every minute of my life. It’s what I was permitted to do. So, you know, I do it when I really want to do it, but otherwise I don’t.':

From "Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future Is Doing to Us," a NYT article about the Nobel laureate by Giles Harvey, published last February. I'm reading it this morning because I'm getting around to listening to things I saved in my Audm app. 

You probably work harder at your job than I do... I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation....

It's so rare to get that from a highly accomplished person. Usually what we hear is that success is mostly about the very hard work you put on top of whatever basic talent you have. Ishiguro has written only 8 novels. He works very intensely at times, but he also takes lots of time off. 

Between the lines in that article, I'm reading that he's as good as he is because of all the refreshment time and because writing novels is not where he set his ambition when he was young. He wanted to be a singer-songwriter. It's the reverse of Leonard Cohen. 

As for Dylan, there are many here among us who spent our early years absorbing his influence. We all started somewhere. Ishiguro's entry point was the album "John Wesley Harding." I went in through "Bringing It All Back Home."