Top 100 Ian McEwan Quotes

#1. When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #3925
#2. You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #4442
#3. We often tell ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, when we could be doing the same lying down in bed, face to face and naked.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #31335
#4. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #34194
#5. A dirty, joyous, bare-limbed freedom, which rose in his imagination like a vast airy cathedral, ruined perhaps, roofless, fan-vaulted to the skies, where they would weightlessly drift upward in a powerful embrace ...

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #40271
#6. Don't unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #72423
#7. But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were three gins and a bottle of wine

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #90411
#8. How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #98975
#9. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #100370
#10. It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #103687
#11. It was always the view of my parents ... that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #131173
#12. Where the human need for order meets
the human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #155212
#13. Who you get, and how it works out- there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #195078
#14. At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #226776
#15. But the lovers are locked in, as only lovers can be.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #241520
#16. At some level you remain an orphan for life; looking after children is one way of looking after yourself.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #250253
#17. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #326954
#18. I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #329801
#19. one could drown in irrelevance.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #340027
#20. She had never lost that childhood pleasure in seeing pages covered in her own handwriting.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #348704
#21. These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #355561
#22. They had never discussed feelings, and had no language for them now.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #385741
#23. Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #387704
#24. Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #390954
#25. And they became cool, even though they were both rather short." -p. 205

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #404688
#26. You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #411940
#27. Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #443202
#28. Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #492871
#29. A blend of desolation and outrage. Or longing and fury. She wanted him back, she never wanted to see him again.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #501232
#30. This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #502642
#31. Mace leaned on his shovel and did a passable imitation. "'I think we'd rather not.' Very good, guv'nor. I'll remember that next time."
"Divigation was nice. Where'd you get that one?"
"He swallowed a ****ing dictionary," Corporal Nettle said proudly.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #515391
#32. Some people go nowhere, even into disputes, without a soundtrack.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #521444
#33. The infinite variety of the human condition precludes arbitrary definition.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #542910
#34. Falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #552683
#35. she described in a separate paragraph the Haredi community, and how within it religious practice was a total way of life. The distinction between what was rendered to Caesar and what to God was meaningless, much as it was for observant Muslims.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #569231
#36. Do you know when Jehovah's Witnesses were commanded to refuse blood transfusions?" "It's set down in Genesis. It dates from the Creation." "It dates from 1945, Mr. Henry. Before then it was perfectly acceptable.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #611811
#37. I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #628725
#38. It was a chilly sensation, growing up.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #635431
#39. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #646410
#40. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #693781
#41. Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #696729
#42. Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #702997
#43. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #734890
#44. When he replied with her name, it sounded like a new word - the syllables remained the same, the meaning was different.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #735116
#45. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #749494
#46. The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #766118
#47. Not being boring is quite a challenge.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #772371
#48. Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #784554
#49. I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #830249
#50. In Leon's life, or rather, in his account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed. Everyone was celebrated at least in some degree, as though it was a cause for wonder that anyone existed at all.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #833499
#51. Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #844225
#52. And this was to be his main point - there was one overriding reason for our failure, which was the lack of coordinated intelligence. Too many agencies, too many bureaucracies defending their corners, too many points of demarcation, insufficient centralized control.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #844856
#53. Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #845750
#54. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #846545
#55. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill ...

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #958237
#56. Private Latimer had become a monster, and he must have guessed this was so. Did a girl love him before? Could she continue to?

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #985155
#57. Possession, belonging, repetition.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1006841
#58. What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1026821
#59. It was here one brilliant November midnight that Edward wrote a formal letter to Violet and Geoffrey Ponting declaring his ambition to marry their daughter, and did not quite ask their permission so much as confidently expected their approval.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1034006
#60. When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1054213
#61. In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1090076
#62. Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1094582
#63. And I was with the man I loved and we were rabbiting on about how we were going to help change the world, and we were on our way home to start our lives together. I even remember thinking to myself, I've never been happier than this. This is it!

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1100552
#64. Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1122192
#65. ... he felt unusually warm toward humankind. He even thought that it could warm to him. Everyone, all of us, individually facing oblivion as a matter of course, and no one complaining much. As a species, not the best imaginable, but certainly the best, no, the most interesting there was.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1163586
#66. It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1166198
#67. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #1168947
#68. I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1174844
#69. Her forehead, so high and oval, reminded him of how Shakespeare was supposed to look. He was not certain how to put this to her.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1180280
#70. These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1213311
#71. Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom door.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1284986
#72. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #1285589
#73. This was not a fairy tale, this was the real, the adult world in which frogs did not
address princesses, and the only messages were the ones that people sent

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1300656
#74. In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1305105
#75. You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1326016
#76. She lay in the dark and knew everything.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1327913
#77. Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1329253
#78. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1334517
#79. Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1351661
#80. I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1403250
#81. But this inglorious revolution wasn't for me. I didn't want a sex shop in every town.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1407774
#82. Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1421655
#83. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #1500254
#84. Say it again slowly, that thing about the river.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1565130
#85. Then it came to her plainly what she felt about Jack's return. So simple. It was disappointment that he had not stayed away. Just a little longer. Nothing more than that. Disappointment.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1601850
#86. I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore ... it's in the stars!

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1611483
#87. His wives had discovered early on what a poor or frightening prospect of a father he presented and they had protected themselves and got out.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1642937
#88. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #1649763
#89. He was supposed to be reading, but all he could do was watch her and love her bare arms, her Alice band, her straight back, the sweet tilt of her chin as she tucked the instrument under it ...

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1682627
#90. Join MI5? I was ready to lead it.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1685237
#91. I often don't read reviews.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1686779
#92. Clive thought of his work in totality, of how varied and rich it seemed whenever he was able to raise his head and take the long perspective, how it represented in abstract a whole history of his lifetime. And still so much to do.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1716422
#93. The homely and erotic patters of marriage are not easily discarded.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1774130
#94. 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

Ian McEwan Quotes #1785234
#95. What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1796819
#96. Everyone believed that to be caught out in a shameful moment when neck muscles relax and the head snaps forward might damage career prospects. But believing was not quite enough. Heavy eyelids in the late afternoon had their own logic, their own peculiar weight.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1803847
#97. I made the enthusiast's mistake of assuming that everyone shared my previous ignorance.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1804549
#98. This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1808124
#99. Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1811655
#100. Even a trashy movie can make you cry. There were deep emotional reactions that ducked the censure of the higher reasoning processes and forced us to enact, however vestigially, our roles - me, the indignant secret lover revealed; Clarissa the woman cruelly betrayed.

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes #1860960

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