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
Cost
Return
Moment
Moments
Realignment
Dream
Oblivious
Littles
Daydreaming
Little
Seemed
Always
Worse

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.
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Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time.
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Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
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I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.
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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.
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I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
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The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
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Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
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At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
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That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
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London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who had started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.
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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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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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Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
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Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
Ian Mcewan
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Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
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I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed.
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
Ian Mcewan