Ian McEwan Quotes

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.

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."

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.

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

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.

Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.

This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.

But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.

No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.

The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.

It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.

It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.

He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.

Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.

...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.

I'm quite good at not writing.

The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.

I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.

He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.

She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.

No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.

Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.

Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

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

She loved him, though not at this particular moment.

Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning.

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.