Ian McEwan Quotes

What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.

I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.

If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.

Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.

And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.

I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.

What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?

However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.

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.

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.

But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

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.

Something has happened, hasn't it? ... It's like being up close to something so large you don't even see it. Even now, I'm not sure I can. But I know it's there.

was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.

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

Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race.

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.

I don't really believe in evil at all.

I often don't read reviews.

In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.

What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.

I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you’ve done before.

Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State

I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.

When people ask, "Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?," I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.

Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.

When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.

When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

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

Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.

However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you're inside them.

Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.

She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.