Ian McEwan Quotes

115 Sourced Quotes

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home—Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?

Ian McEwan
These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.

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

Ian McEwan
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation—it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.

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

Ian McEwan
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.

Ian McEwan
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.

Ian McEwan
In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.

Ian McEwan
How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

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

Ian McEwan
But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.

Ian McEwan
How can one understand the inner life of a character, real or fictional, without knowing the state of her finances?

Ian McEwan
There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

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

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
You want a picture of futility? It's a tunnel in the desert, from nowhere to nowhere, four hundred and fifty feet long.

Ian McEwan
It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning,

Ian McEwan
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.

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

Ian McEwan
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.

Ian McEwan
The world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.

Ian McEwan
I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.

Ian McEwan
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.

Ian McEwan
Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.

Ian McEwan
Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.

Ian McEwan
If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.

Ian McEwan
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.

Ian McEwan
It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.

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

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

Ian McEwan