Ian McEwan Quotes
I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.
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.
When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
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).
What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.
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 cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.
Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.
Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.
Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.
Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
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.
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.
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.
It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?
Someone once asked me "If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?" And I said "No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this."
