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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Understand
Ideas
Chasm
Chasms
Execution
Lays
Began
Idea

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Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
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All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.
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I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
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He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.
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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 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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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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Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
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These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.
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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.
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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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The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
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At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
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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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But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.
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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 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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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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Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.
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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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