#ch

We can consciously end our life almost anytime we choose. This ability is an endowment, like laughing and blushing, given to no other animal... in any given moment, by not exercising the option of suicide, we are choosing to live. ↗

— Peter McWilliams

#almost #animal #any #anytime #blushing

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#childhood #experience #i #inhibited #knew

Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#bad #conscience #conviction #deed #deep

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#apologize #being #come #curtain #decent

Try and understand what part you have to play in the world in which you live. There's more to life than you know and it's all happening out there. Discover what part you can play and then go for it. ↗

— Ian Mckellen

#go #go for it #happening #know #life

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#building #confidence #constructed #enter #gate

I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#close #close friends #friends #groups #i

It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#atonement #beach #bit #dirty #get

Not being boring is quite a challenge. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#boring #challenge #quite

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#charge #controlling #crucially #flow #information