Quote

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Like
Visible
Cool
Lying
White
Projecting
Social
Submerged
Littles
Selves
Little
Ice
Self
Mostly

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At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
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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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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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When people ask, Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?, I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.
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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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It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.
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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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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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When anything can happen, everything matters.
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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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The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
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He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
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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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The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
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It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
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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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Not being boring is quite a challenge.
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
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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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In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
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