I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two. . Ian Mcewan
Some Similar Quotes
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  2. The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW. - Shannon L. Alder
  3. People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realistic! '" (2009)] - Dylan Moran
  4. There are always loose ends in real life. - Robert Galbraith
  5. Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more. - Michel Houellebecq
More Quotes By Ian Mcewan
  1. When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
  2. 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...
  3. Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had...
  4. The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
  5. This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.
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