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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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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Every
Determined
Novel
Turn
Quite
Turns
Actually
Funny
Oppressive
Find
Novels

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.
Ian Mcewan
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Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
Ian Mcewan
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I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
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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But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
Ian Mcewan
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No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.
Ian Mcewan
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And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
Ian Mcewan
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When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.
Ian Mcewan
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I'm quite good at not writing.
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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I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time.
Ian Mcewan
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...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
Ian Mcewan
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I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
Ian Mcewan
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The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.
Ian Mcewan
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One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.
Ian Mcewan
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I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.
Ian Mcewan
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She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?
Ian Mcewan
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He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.
Ian Mcewan
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From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
Ian Mcewan
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When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.
Ian Mcewan