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Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Lavatory
Claustrophobic
Arguing
Dead
Experience
Men

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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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Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
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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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But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
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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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That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
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Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
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Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
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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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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 loved him, though not at this particular moment.
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It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.
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If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
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I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you’ve done before.
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None of us really either know the circumstances of our death or are likely to exert as much control over it as we would like to, but we can certainly have a little more say in it if we are terminally ill than we have at the moment. That's the element of dignity, but sure, life is very hard to organise even when you are fit and healthy.
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She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
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At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
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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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