Ian McEwan quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ian McEwan on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

But the lovers are locked in, as only lovers can be.

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

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

Or he was simply pretending - like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before.

Regarding yourself as a highly rational and compassionate being does not make you rational and compassionate in all circumstances.

I don't really believe in evil at all.

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

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

And roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere.

There is a compassion in rational thought that is sometimes missing in religious conviction.

Not blemishes. Adornments.

Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose.

Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought.

Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.

Don't unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth.

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

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

It was a chilly sensation, growing up.

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

This, as they used to say, was the side on which her bread was buttered.

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.

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

Join MI5? I was ready to lead it.

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

To take up the violin or any instrument was an act of hope, it implied a future.

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

Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.

Narrative Tension is primarily about witholding information.

Private Latimer had become a monster, and he must have guessed this was so. Did a girl love him before? Could she continue to?

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.

Children hated generously, capriciously.

He wasn't offended. She was the one who was over-interpreting, and jittery in his presence, and she was annoyed with herself.

I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.

Your reputation will rest only on this, because ultimately reality is social, it's among others that we have to live and their judgments matter.

They had never discussed feelings, and had no language for them now.

Perhaps she would become one of those women, pitied or envied, who chose not to have children.

By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives.

Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was?

Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.

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

Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.

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.

Twas ostensibly ominous in the overview
To be 'orribly and onerously overrun.

The homely and erotic patters of marriage are not easily discarded.

How do you feel?'
Scared,' she said. 'Really scared.'
But you don't look it.'
I feel I'm shivering inside.

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

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.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

How quickly the dead faded into each other,

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

In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.

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

In the minds of the principals, the history of the marriage was redrafted to have been always doomed, love was recast as delusion.

But this inglorious revolution wasn't for me. I didn't want a sex shop in every town.

The conversation had turned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other

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

That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.

Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence

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

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

What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.

Above the rush-hour din it was her ideal self she heard, the pianist she could never become, performing faultlessly Bach's second partita.

Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.

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

Briony said reasonably, 'How can you hate plays?'
'It's just showing off.' Pierrot shrugged as he delivered this self-evident truth.

Not men who ran the world, but who made it run.

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air

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

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

A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets...

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

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

Since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.

.. From there we came to love. We told each other what lovers never tire of hearing and needing to say.

There was[is] something seriously wrong with the world for which neither God nor His absence could be blamed.

Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.

Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.

The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.

Steve Earle, the thinking man's Bruce Springsteen,

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.

Say it again slowly, that thing about the river.

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

Reading was my way of not thinking about maths. More than that (or do I mean less?), it was my way of not thinking.

I made the enthusiast's mistake of assuming that everyone shared my previous ignorance.

Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not.

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.

Her forehead, so high and oval, reminded him of how Shakespeare was supposed to look. He was not certain how to put this to her.

One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.

There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact: remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.

She lay in the dark and knew everything.

She felt like a hospital patient who longs for her kindly visitor to leave so she can resume being ill.

Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on.