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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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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Else
Someone
Nothing
Every
Unintentionally
Something
Measure
Really
Finally
People
Taught
Quite

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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Someone once asked me If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you? And I said No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this.
Ian Mcewan
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I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
Ian Mcewan
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I'm quite good at not writing.
Ian Mcewan
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Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
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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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i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
Ian Mcewan
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When anything can happen, everything matters.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
Ian Mcewan
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It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
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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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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I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
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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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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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
Ian Mcewan
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I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'
Ian Mcewan
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She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime.
Ian Mcewan
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All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
Ian Mcewan