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Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Atheist
Moral
Moment
Comes
Sense
Moments
Believe
Really

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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Not being boring is quite a challenge.
Ian Mcewan
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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
Ian Mcewan
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Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
Ian Mcewan
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A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
Ian Mcewan
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It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
Ian Mcewan
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Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
Ian Mcewan
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The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
Ian Mcewan
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
Ian Mcewan
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
Ian Mcewan
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I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.
Ian Mcewan
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You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
Ian Mcewan
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It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
Ian Mcewan
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We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.
Ian Mcewan
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Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves.
Ian Mcewan
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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
Ian Mcewan
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There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
Ian Mcewan
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I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'
Ian Mcewan
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When anything can happen, everything matters.
Ian Mcewan
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It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning.
Ian Mcewan
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She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime.
Ian Mcewan