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And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Feelings
Away
Thought
Always
Sigh
Cheerful
Clever
Feeling

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
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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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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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The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.
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The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
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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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Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
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When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.
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There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
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All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
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A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
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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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The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
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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 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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I'm quite good at not writing.
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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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She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
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