Quote

You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Tell
Persons
Person
Firsts
Unravel
First
Nails
Life
Depression
Starts
Among

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
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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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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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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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The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
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It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
Ian Mcewan
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i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
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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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
Ian Mcewan
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No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
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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There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.
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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At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
Ian Mcewan
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For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
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
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
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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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