Ian McEwan Quotes

115 Sourced Quotes

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

Ian McEwan
On a recent Sunday evening, Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, "When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in – you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto – think small."

Ian McEwan
Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time. They would have been excited. What richness! They would have plundered this new science for their imagery.

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

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

Ian McEwan
When a court determines any question with respect to... the upbringing of a child... the child's welfare shall be the court's paramount consideration.

Ian McEwan
Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.

Ian McEwan
It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.

Ian McEwan
The lost child was everyone's property. But Stephen was alone.

Ian McEwan
He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.

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
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

Ian McEwan
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.

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
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
All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.

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
It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.

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

Ian McEwan
And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage.

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

Ian McEwan
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.

Ian McEwan
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

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

Ian McEwan
I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.

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
When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.

Ian McEwan
The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn't say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don't know you very well, are likely to think you're rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.

Ian McEwan
It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

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

Ian McEwan