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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
Execution
Lays
Began
Idea
Understand
Ideas
Chasm
Chasms

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She loved him, though not at this particular moment.
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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
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I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.
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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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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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At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
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I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
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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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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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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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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
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Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
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Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
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The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
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It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
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From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
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Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves.
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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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These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
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