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When anything can happen, everything matters.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Happens
Anything
Everything
Matter
Matters
Happen

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
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.
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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
Ian Mcewan
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I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.
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He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
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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.
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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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.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
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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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.
Ian Mcewan
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I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
Ian Mcewan
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You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
Ian Mcewan
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That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
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