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And Now She Was Back In The World, Not One She Could Make, But The One That Had Made Her, And She Felt Herself Shrinking Under The Early Evening Sky. She Was Weary Of Being Outdoors, But She Was Not Ready To Go In. Was That Really All There Was In Life, Indoors Or Out? Wasn't There Somewhere Else For People To Go?

-Ian Mcewan

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And Now She Was

Ian Mcewan

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And Now She Was Back In The World, Not One She Could Make, But The One That Had Made Her, And She Felt Herself Shrinking Under The Early Evening Sky. She Was Weary Of Being Outdoors, But She Was Not Ready To Go In. Was That Really All There Was In Life, Indoors Or Out? Wasn't There Somewhere Else For People To Go?

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By Measuring Individual Human Worth, The Novelist Reveals The Full Enormity Of The State

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The Cost Of Oblivius Daydreaming Was Always This Moment Of Return, The Realigment With What Had Been Before And Now Seemed A Little Worse. Her Reverie, Once Rich In Plausible Details, Had Become A Passing Silliness Before The Hard Mass Of The Actual. It Was Difficult To Come Back.

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This Is How The Entire Course Of A Life Can Be Changed - By Doing Nothing.

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Politics Is The Enemy Of The Imagination.

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My Needs Were Simple I Didn't Bother Much With Themes Or Felicitous Phrases And Skipped Fine Descriptions Of Weather, Landscapes And Interiors. I Wanted Characters I Could Believe In, And I Wanted To Be Made Curious About What Was To Happen To Them. Generally, I Preferred People To Be Falling In And Out Of Love, But I Didn't Mind So Much If They Tried Their Hand At Something Else. It Was Vulgar To Want It, But I Liked Someone To Say 'marry Me' By The End.

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Twenty Years Ago I Might Have Hired A Professional Listener, But Somewhere Along The Way I Had Lost Faith In The Talking Cure. A Genteel Fraud In My View.

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She Sleepwalked From Moment To Moment, And Whole Months Slipped By Without Memory, Without Bearing The Faintest Imprint Of Her Conscious Will.

Briony Began To Understand The Chasm That Lay Between An Idea And Its Execution.

By Concentrating On What Is Good In People, By Appealing To Their Idealism And Their Sense Of Justice, And By Asking Them To Put Their Faith In The Future, Socialists Put Themselves At A Severe Disadvantage.

And Feeling Clever, I've Always Thought, Is Just A Sigh Away From Being Cheerful.

I Couldn't Think About Novels At All. It Seemed The Only Writing That Was Appropriate To That Horrendous Event Was Journalism, Reportage. And, In Fact, I Think The Profession Rose Quite Honorably To The Task. Novelists Require A Slower Turnover, I Mean, In Time.

The Moment You Lose Curiosity In The World, You Might As Well Be Dead.

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I Believe The Novella Is The Perfect Form Of Prose Fiction.

A Story Lives Transformed By A Gesture Not Made Or A Word Not Spoken

At The Risk Of Sounding Like Virginia Woolf, I Could Live On £700 A Year.

Come Back, Come Back To Me

Come Back To Me

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Arguing With A Dead Man In A Lavatory Is A Claustrophobic Experience.

What Idiocy, To Racing Into This Story And Its Labyrinths, Sprinting Away From Our Happiness Among The Fresh Spring Grasses By The Oak.

But How To Do Feelings? All Very Well To Write "she Felt Sad", Or Describe What A Sad Person Might Do, But What Of Sadness Itself, How Was That Put Across So It Could Be Felt In All Its Lowering Immediacy? Even Harder Was The Threat, Or The Confusion Of Feeling Contradictory Things.

Most Of Humanity Gets By Without Reading Novels Or Poetry, And No One Would Deny The Richness Of Their Thoughts.

In A Nuclear Age, And In An Age Of Serious Environmental Degradation, Apocalyptic Belief Creates A Serious Second Order Danger. The Precarious Logic Of Self-interest That Saw Us Through The Cold War Would Collapse If The Leaders Of One Nuclear State Came To Welcome, Or Ceased To Fear Mass Death.

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.

Terrible Events

Imagining What It Is Like To Be Someone Other Than Yourself Is At The Core Of Our Humanity. It Is The Essence Of Compassion, And It Is The Beginning Of Morality.

Scientists Do Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants, Just As Do Writers. Conversely, In The Arts We Do Make Discoveries. We Do Refine Our Tools. So I Am Arguing With, Or At Least Playing With, The Idea That Art Never Improves.

I Was An Intimate Sort Of Child Who Never Spoke Up In Groups. I Preferred Close Friends.

When He Thought Of Her, It Rather Amazed Him, That He Had Let That Girl With Her Violin Go. Now, Of Course, He Saw That Her Self-effacing Proposal Was Quite Irrelevant. 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. Love And Patience- If Only He Had Had Them Both At Once- Would Surely Have Seen Them Both Through.

For Children, Childhood Is Timeless. It Is Always The Present. Everything Is In The Present Tense. Of Course, They Have Memories. Of Course, Time Shifts A Little For Them And Christmas Comes Round In The End. But They Don't Feel It. Today Is What They Feel, And When They Say 'when I Grow Up,' There Is Always An Edge Of Disbelief - How Could They Ever Be Other Than What They Are?

I Read In Announcements Of Deaths 'peacefully In His Sleep' And I Wonder How Many Of Those Are True. Maybe They Are Just Conventional. I Hope They Are True Whenever I Read It Of Someone. [but] I Would Rather Be Awake. Peacefully Awake, Brim Full Of Some Calming Drug That Was Seeing Me Out Of The Door, Having Said My Farewells.

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.

She Loved Him, Though Not At This Particular Moment.

How Guilt Refined The Methods Of Self-torture, Threading The Beads Of Detail Into An Eternal Loop, A Rosary To Be Fingered For A Lifetime.

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.

This Commonplace Cycle Of Falling Asleep And Waking, In Darkness, Under Private Cover, With Another Creature, A Pale Soft Tender Mammal, Putting Faces Together In A Ritual Of Affection, Briefly Settled In The Eternal Necessities Of Warmth, Comfort, Safety, Crossing Limbs To Draw Nearer - A Simple Daily Consolation, Almost Too Obvious, Easy To Forget By Daylight.

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.

I Believe The Novella Is The Perfect Form Of Prose Fiction. It Is The Beautiful Daughter Of A Rambling, Bloated Ill-shaven Giant (but A Giant Who's A Genius On His Best Days).

Writers Are Said To Have Superstitions And Little Rituals. Readers Have Them Too.

Was It Possible That I Was, In The Modern Term, In Denial?

When We Go On About The Big Things, The Political Situation, Global Warming, World Poverty, It All Looks Really Terrible, With Nothing Getting Better, Nothing To Look Forward To. But When I Think Small, Closer In - You Know, A Girl I've Just Met, Or This Song We're Going To Do With Chas, Or Snowboarding Next Month, Then It Looks Great. So This Is Going To Be My Motto - Think Small.

I Don't Hold Grudges.

I Don't Really Believe In Evil At All.

I'm Holding Back, Delaying The Information. I'm Lingering In The Prior Moment Because It Was A Time When Other Outcomes Were Still Possible.

The Luxury Of Being Half-asleep, Exploring The Fringes Of Psychosis In Safety.

All This Happiness On Display Is Suspect... If They Think - And They Could Be Right - That Continued Torture And Summary Executions, Ethnic Cleansing And Occasional Genocide Are Preferable To An Invasion, They Should Be Sombre In Their View.

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