Quote

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Men
Interesting
Relax
Rather
Enter
Passivity
Ends
Intention
Grip
States
Accept
Declared
Might
Reader
Readers
Writing
Accepting
Justify
Even
Ways
Controlled
Way
State
Satan

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
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Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
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Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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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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We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
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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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The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
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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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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'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
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Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
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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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A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
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Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.
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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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The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
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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.
Ian Mcewan