Ian Mcewan Quotes
I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.
Quotes to Explore
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My mother has been a wonderful model for the professional woman - a loving mother dedicated to both her family and her work. She inspired me, made me proud, and developed in me an enormous respect for women in general.
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Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.
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Cats are impossible to work with. They're just very difficult because you can't really train them. They're not really interested in whatever you want them to do. Dogs want to please you; cats only want to please themselves.
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Since entering office, I have focused on working with the people and businesses of New Hampshire to build a stronger economic future through innovation, and in no sector is innovation needed more than our energy industry.
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The music comes through me, and I let it come the way it comes, and it shapes itself. I just hold space for it. I don't intend to write it for a purpose, but it comes as it comes and am proud of the way it can support change because I believe strongly in what I sing about.
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When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
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The biggest challenge is always the governments - they try to stop all good things. I try to stay away from them as much as I can, as I know if someone can destroy something good, it's the government.
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For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.
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Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.
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I created my own charity called My Peak Challenge. We've been able to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds. It's helping change people's lives, and I've had lots of wonderful letters about it.
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Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
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The good reviews that people have told me about through the years haven't really helped me do my job. So it's kind of like, if your hair turns out right you want to go out, you don't just want to stay in and look in the mirror. That's kind of what reading a review is like to me; it's like reveling in something that's just one night.
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We are all several different people. There are different aspects of our nature that are competing.
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We Germans should know that we're good at constructing cars, and we have a lot of good qualities. But we're not the funniest.
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Most of Planned Parenthood's work focuses on health care for low-income women: things like screenings for breast cancer and diabetes, and family planning.
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To be aware of others' accomplishments and the indebtedness we have to so many people is to appreciate and begin to respect all members of the human family.
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I liked 'Star Wars,' but I wasn't an uberfan like many people are.
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Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do.
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The theater business has allowed me, in a way the movie and TV business has not, to do very, very interesting work. So that's what I do.
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People didn't think animals thought or remembered or had minds! They most certainly do: any pet owner knows more than a lot of scientists about animals.
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When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.
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The investment we're all looking for is actually saving labor... Look at what the internet is doing to retail.
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There is a grim and ghastly humor -- the humor that is born of a pathetic philosophy -- which now and then strikes me in reading the bright and keen-witted work of our American paragraphers. It is a humor that may be crystallized by hunger and sorrow and tears. It is not found elsewhere as it is in America. It is out of the question in England, because an Englishman cannot poke fun at himself. He cannot joke about an empty flour-barrel. We can: especially if by doing it we may swap the joke for another barrel of flour. We can never be a nation of snobs so long as we are willing to poke fun at ourselves.
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I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.
