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Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Politician
Imagination
Enemy
Politics

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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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Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
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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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If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
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When people ask, Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?, I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.
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Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
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I'm quite good at not writing.
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It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
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But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill.
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
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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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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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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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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
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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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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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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
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Not being boring is quite a challenge.
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And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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