Quote

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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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Return
Moment
Moments
Realignment
Dream
Oblivious
Littles
Daydreaming
Little
Seemed
Always
Worse
Cost

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Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
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And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
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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.
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In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
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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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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.
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Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.
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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.
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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.
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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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No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.
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From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
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Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
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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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