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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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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Playing
Scientists
Stand
Arguing
Least
Arts
Idea
Shoulders
Refine
Art
Scientist
Conversely
Ideas
Discovery
Improves
Make
Tools
Discoveries
Never
Writers
Giants

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
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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.
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Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
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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.
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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.
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I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.
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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.
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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.
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Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.
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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.
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For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
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But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.
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I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.
Ian Mcewan
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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
Ian Mcewan
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The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
Ian Mcewan