Ian McEwan Quotes

115 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.

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

Ian McEwan
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.

Ian McEwan
In our delirium, most of us wanted to talk. We babbled, by email, on the phone, around kitchen tables. We knew there was a greater reckoning ahead, but we could not quite feel it yet. Sheer amazement kept getting in the way.

Ian McEwan
By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.

Ian McEwan
He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.

Ian McEwan
Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.

Ian McEwan
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.

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

Ian McEwan
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.

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

Ian McEwan
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

Ian McEwan
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.

Ian McEwan
We need to play out our fears within the safe confines of the imaginary.

Ian McEwan
Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

Ian McEwan
Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your unconscious choice of mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.

Ian McEwan
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

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

Ian McEwan
Mostly, we are good when it makes sense. A good society is one that makes sense of being good.

Ian McEwan
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.

Ian McEwan
It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

Ian McEwan