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The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Asleep
Exploring
Luxury
Safety
Half
Fringes
Psychosis
Fringe

More quotes by 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.
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No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
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It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning.
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But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill.
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You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
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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.
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The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.
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Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
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I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
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.
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That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
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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There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
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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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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I'm quite good at not writing.
Ian Mcewan
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Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
Ian Mcewan
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This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.
Ian Mcewan
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Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan