Ian McEwan Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Ian McEwan on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
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.
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.
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.
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.
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.
He wasn't offended. She was the one who was over-interpreting, and jittery in his presence, and she was annoyed with herself.
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.
By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives.
Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
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.
How do you feel?'
Scared,' she said. 'Really scared.'
But you don't look it.'
I feel I'm shivering inside.
Scared,' she said. 'Really scared.'
But you don't look it.'
I feel I'm shivering inside.
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.
In the minds of the principals, the history of the marriage was redrafted to have been always doomed, love was recast as delusion.
The conversation had turned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other
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.
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.
'It's just showing off.' Pierrot shrugged as he delivered this self-evident truth.
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.
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.
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.
Reading was my way of not thinking about maths. More than that (or do I mean less?), it was my way of not thinking.
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.
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.