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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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Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.
Ian Mcewan
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
Ian Mcewan
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i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
Ian Mcewan
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Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.
Ian Mcewan
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Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.
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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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
Ian Mcewan
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Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take 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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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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
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At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
Ian Mcewan
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Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.
Ian Mcewan
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Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
Ian Mcewan
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I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.
Ian Mcewan
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If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
Ian Mcewan
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If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
Ian Mcewan
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He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
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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Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.
Ian Mcewan