Quote

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.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Read
Skill
Moment
Poem
Understand
Acquire
Moments
Judging
Balances
Trying
Skills
Slowing
Like
Completely
Noticing
Balance
Fashioned
Poetry
Stopping

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And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
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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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i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
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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.
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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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The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
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One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.
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I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
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...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
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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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Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
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I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.
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Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.
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It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
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I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
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When anything can happen, everything matters.
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The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
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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?
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There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
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