Ian McEwan Quotes

115 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer - a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight.

Ian McEwan
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

Ian McEwan
You cannot be cruel to someone if you fully understand what it is to be them. You have to somehow screen that out. You have to say to yourself, "They're not really humans." Or you have to bring into line some sort of powerful ideology or some crazed religious certainty in order to blot out that human instinct.

Ian McEwan
I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee

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
Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.

Ian McEwan
Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.

Ian McEwan
Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.

Ian McEwan
Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

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

Ian McEwan
It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.

Ian McEwan
Rain had fallen most days of the summer, the city trees appeared swollen, their crests enlarged, the pavements were cleansed and smooth, the cars on High Holborn showroom clean.

Ian McEwan
The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.

Ian McEwan
I'm not against religion in the sense that I feel I can't tolerate it, but I think written into the rubric of religion is the certainty of its own truth. And since there are 6,000 religions currently on the face of the earth, they can't all be right. And only the secular spirit can guarantee those freedoms and it's the secular spirit that they contest.

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
Someone once asked me "If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?" And I said "No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this."

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

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

Ian McEwan