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
Writing
Accepting
Justify
Even
Ways
Controlled
Way
State
Satan
Men
Interesting
Relax
Rather
Enter
Passivity
Ends
Intention
Grip
States
Accept
Declared
Might
Reader
Readers

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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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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A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
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Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
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Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
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In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
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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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Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
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Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.
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At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.
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The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
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She loved him, though not at this particular moment.
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I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.
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It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
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When anything can happen, everything matters.
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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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Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
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Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves.
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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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When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.
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Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
Ian Mcewan