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These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Light
Magnified
Nothing
Substance
Sounds
Absence
Presence
Everyday
Darkness
Sound

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.
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.
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When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.
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These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.
Ian Mcewan
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Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
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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No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
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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You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
Ian Mcewan
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The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
Ian Mcewan
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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
Ian Mcewan
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Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
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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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
Ian Mcewan
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I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you’ve done before.
Ian Mcewan
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Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.
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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Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.
Ian Mcewan