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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
Ideas
Chasm
Chasms
Execution
Lays
Began
Idea
Understand

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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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I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed.
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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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Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
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The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
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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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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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Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
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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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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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Not being boring is quite a challenge.
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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
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I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.
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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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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.
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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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One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.
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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
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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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