Ian Mcewan Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Ian Mcewan

Ian Mcewan Quotes & Sayings

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

Not being boring is quite a challenge. — Ian McEwan

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

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

When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion. — Ian McEwan

In our decline we live in the shadow of giants. — Ian McEwan

The novel is too capacious, inclusive, unruly, and personal for perfection. Too long, sometimes too much like life. — Ian McEwan

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

Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself. — Ian McEwan

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

Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it. — Ian McEwan

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

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option. — Ian McEwan

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

Not blemishes. Adornments. — Ian McEwan

Children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival. — Ian McEwan

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. — Ian McEwan

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. — Ian McEwan

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. — Ian McEwan

The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought. — Ian McEwan

Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy. — Ian McEwan

I often don't read reviews. — Ian McEwan

She belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ. — Ian McEwan

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

You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go. — Ian McEwan

Loud people, especially loud women, always attract enemies — Ian McEwan

Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt service people do up every single button? — Ian McEwan

She could have phoned one of three friends, but she could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real. — Ian McEwan

The work we have to do is with ourselves ,If we're ever going to be at peace with each other. — Ian McEwan

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

And it interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained. — Ian McEwan

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

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

Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world. — Ian McEwan

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

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

But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were three gins and a bottle of wine — Ian McEwan

Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness. — Ian McEwan

Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy. — Ian McEwan

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

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. — Ian McEwan

She lay in the dark and knew everything. — Ian McEwan

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

Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it. — Ian McEwan

It's hilarious to recognize how completely another person resembles your imperfect self. — Ian McEwan

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

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead. — Ian McEwan

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

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

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

These hands are steady enough, but they are large. Had he been a proper pianist - he's dabbled inexpertly - his ten-note span might be of use. — Ian McEwan

They both knew the vitality of the unsaid, whose invisible spirits danced around them now. — Ian McEwan

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

Other women cloy/The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry/Where most she satisfies. — Ian McEwan

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

She loved him, though not at this particular moment. — Ian McEwan

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. — Ian McEwan

I don't hold grudges. — Ian McEwan

Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom door. — Ian McEwan

A baton of light across the bracken redeemed the reputation of the color brown with fiery reds and yellows. — Ian McEwan

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

How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten. — Ian McEwan

That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away. — Ian McEwan

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 — Ian McEwan

All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die? — Ian McEwan

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

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

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

The world should take note: not everything is getting worse. — Ian McEwan

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

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert. — Ian McEwan

If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy. — Ian McEwan

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

He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now. — Ian McEwan

Beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation. — Ian McEwan

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

I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress. — Ian McEwan

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

Consent has rough edges. — Ian McEwan

At some level you remain an orphan for life; looking after children is one way of looking after yourself. — Ian McEwan

So, one-third of the time it's a bad idea to move, which means that two-thirds of the time it's a good idea. — Ian McEwan

Everyone nodded, nobody agreed. — Ian McEwan

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

And they became cool, even though they were both rather short." -p. 205 — Ian McEwan

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

Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition. — Ian McEwan

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. — Ian McEwan

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

It's 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? — Ian McEwan

When anything can happen, everything matters. — Ian McEwan

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

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

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

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

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

He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning. — Ian McEwan

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

What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife. — Ian McEwan

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

In those first moments it was easier to conceal a confusion of feeling behind a motherly tone — Ian McEwan