Quote

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.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Feel
Obvious
Curtains
Feels
Intelligence
Apologizing
Even
Watches
Halfway
Every
Watch
Shakespeare
Never
Littles
Production
Men
Little
Productions
Sorrowful
Time
Come
Decent
Curtain
Play
Warm
Apologize

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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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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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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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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
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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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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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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
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The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.
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No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
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If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
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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.
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She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
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Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
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I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.
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When anything can happen, everything matters.
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
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Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
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