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I'm quite good at not writing.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Writing
Good
Quite

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
Ian Mcewan
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Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.
Ian Mcewan
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It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
Ian Mcewan
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At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.
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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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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It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.
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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He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
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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London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who had started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.
Ian Mcewan
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There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
Ian Mcewan
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I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.
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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Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.
Ian Mcewan
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I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.
Ian Mcewan
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Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
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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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
Ian Mcewan
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I often don't read reviews.
Ian Mcewan