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It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Naming
Resistance
Blueprints
Provide
Benefits
Novelist
Duty
Uplifting
Successful
Novelists
Firsts
Opposition
First
Benefit
Insurrection
Important
Tales

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill.
Ian Mcewan
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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
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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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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No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
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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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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I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
Ian Mcewan
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All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.
Ian Mcewan
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The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Ian Mcewan
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Not being boring is quite a challenge.
Ian Mcewan
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Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
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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There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.
Ian Mcewan
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Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
Ian Mcewan
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Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
Ian Mcewan
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The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
Ian Mcewan
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I often don't read reviews.
Ian Mcewan
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At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
Ian Mcewan
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He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.
Ian Mcewan