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

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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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She loved him, though not at this particular moment.
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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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The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
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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.
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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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Not being boring is quite a challenge.
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It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
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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 world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
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I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.
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There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
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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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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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I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.
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Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.
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I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.
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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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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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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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