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I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Prose
Fiction
Perfect
Form
Believe
Novella
Rambling

More quotes by 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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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.
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.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
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
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It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
Ian Mcewan
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For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
Ian Mcewan
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It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning.
Ian Mcewan
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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
Ian Mcewan
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She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
Ian Mcewan
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It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
Ian Mcewan
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Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
Ian Mcewan
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
Ian Mcewan
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At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
Ian Mcewan
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No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.
Ian Mcewan
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And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
Ian Mcewan
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But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
Ian Mcewan