Quote

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.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Way
Start
Pastiche
People
Write
Afford
Stories
Lots
Young
Advice
Give
Failure
Giving
Short
Great
Writer
Writing
Asks

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
Ian Mcewan
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Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
Ian Mcewan
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
Ian Mcewan
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You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
Ian Mcewan
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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
Ian Mcewan
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Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.
Ian Mcewan
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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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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.
Ian Mcewan
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I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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I often don't read reviews.
Ian Mcewan
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She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?
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Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.
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I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
Ian Mcewan
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Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
Ian Mcewan
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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
Ian Mcewan
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He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.
Ian Mcewan