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Michael Frayn

Michael Frayn Books

Playwright

Constructions

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Plays--one

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Spies

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Sweet Dreams

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“Failure, it occurred to him, was the secular equivalent of sin. Modern secular man was born into a world whose moral framework was composed not of laws and duties, but of tests and comparisons. There were no absolute outside standards, so standards had to generate themselves from within, relativistically. One's natural sense of inadequacy could be kept at bay only pious acts of repeated successfulness. And failure was more terrifying than sin. Sin could be repented of by an act of volition; failure could not be disposed of so easily.”

SuccessSinFailure
Book:Towards the End of the Morning
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“We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'. If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever.”

LongingMeaning
Book:Constructions
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“Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous.... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky.”

WayLooksLittlesDoeFactsHandsMovingHalfMillionsSunSkyGoes OnStructureFingersLiftsClockInchesAssertionTick
Book:Constructions
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“Even in the things that look most frivolous there has to be the threat of something quite painful to make the comedy work. I suppose the play of mine that's best know is NOISES OFF, which everyone thinks is a simple farce about actors making fools of themselves. But I think it makes people laugh because everyone is terrified inside themselves of having some kind of breakdown, of being unable to go on. When people laugh at that play, they're laughing at a surrogate version of the disaster which might occur to them.”

PeopleThinkingKnowsLooksKindPlayMightActorsSimpleLaughingComedyMinesFoolGoes OnThreatPainfulDisasterNoiseVersionsCraftsTerrifiedBreakdownMaking People LaughFrivolousFarceSurrogates
Author:Michael Frayn
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“I've never written a fiction before about real people. . . . I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN].”

PeopleIfsThinkingWritingRealCharacterSeemsFictionWrittenHappenedMetsImpressionCraftsPlausibleCopenhagen
Author:Michael Frayn
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“And now everything has changed once again. The air of the Close each evening is full of bird song - I've never really noticed it before. Full of birdsong and summer perfumes, full of strange glimpses and intimations just out of the corner of my eye, of longings and sadness and undefined hopes.It has a name, this sweet disturbance. Its name is Lamorna.”

EyeSongNamesAirSadnessChangedStrangeSweetSummerBirdLongingCornersEveningGlimpsePerfumeDisturbanceThings Have ChangedBirdsongUndefinedBird Song
Author:Michael Frayn
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