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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.

Ian Mcewan

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

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That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
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At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
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All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
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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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But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
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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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I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.
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i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
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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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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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Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.
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When anything can happen, everything matters.
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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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Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.
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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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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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If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
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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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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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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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