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A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Break
Atonement
Else
Torn
Persons
Novelists
Person
Vulnerable
Thing
Easily
People
Material
Mending
Materials
Mended
Among
Repairing

More quotes by 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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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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It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
Ian Mcewan
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None of us really either know the circumstances of our death or are likely to exert as much control over it as we would like to, but we can certainly have a little more say in it if we are terminally ill than we have at the moment. That's the element of dignity, but sure, life is very hard to organise even when you are fit and healthy.
Ian Mcewan
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I often don't read reviews.
Ian Mcewan
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The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.
Ian Mcewan
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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
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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But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
Ian Mcewan
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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
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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That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
Ian Mcewan
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Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
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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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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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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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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She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
Ian Mcewan
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No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
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