Quote

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.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Stills
Lingering
Still
Prior
Back
Outcomes
Time
Holding
Information
Possible
Moment
Moments
Delaying

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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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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The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.
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No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
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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 had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
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But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
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It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning.
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
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There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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When anything can happen, everything matters.
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Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
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It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
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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.
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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.
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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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Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
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She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime.
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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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