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
Fashioned
Balance
Stopping
Poetry
Read
Skill
Moment
Poem
Understand
Acquire
Balances
Moments
Judging
Slowing
Trying
Skills
Noticing
Like
Completely

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If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
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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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This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.
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If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
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It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
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I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.
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There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
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And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
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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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Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
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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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Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
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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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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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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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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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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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