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From Quotes by Ian Mcewan
- London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems;…
- In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.
- What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.
- Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.
- One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have…
- A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her…
- It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented…
- In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now…
- There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state…
- It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in…
- What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.
- I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation…
- 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…
- You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
- Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if…
- She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.
- 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…
- He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible…
- Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no…
- And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
- Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to…
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