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I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.
Ian McEwan
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Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.
Ian McEwan
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Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
Ian McEwan
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Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
Ian McEwan
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Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.
Ian McEwan
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I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.
Ian McEwan
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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 music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
Ian McEwan
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Rain had fallen most days of the summer, the city trees appeared swollen, their crests enlarged, the pavements were cleansed and smooth, the cars on High Holborn showroom clean.
Ian McEwan
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The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.
Ian McEwan
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I'm not against religion in the sense that I feel I can't tolerate it, but I think written into the rubric of religion is the certainty of its own truth. And since there are 6,000 religions currently on the face of the earth, they can't all be right. And only the secular spirit can guarantee those freedoms and it's the secular spirit that they contest.
Ian McEwan
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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.
Ian McEwan
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Someone once asked me "If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?" And I said "No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this."
Ian McEwan
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This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.
Ian McEwan
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Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.
Ian McEwan
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We need to play out our fears within the safe confines of the imaginary.
Ian McEwan
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Ian McEwan
Creative Commons
Born:
June 21, 1948
(age 75)
Bio:
Ian Russell McEwan is an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Known for:
Atonement (2001)
The Children Act (2014)
Nutshell (2016)
Sweet Tooth (2012)
On Chesil Beach (2007)
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love
people
moment
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time
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sense
years
simple
darkness
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human
self
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