Top 100 Mcewan Quotes
#1. I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
Jeanette Winterson
#2. I'll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.
David Bowie
#3. There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
Ruth Rendell
#4. I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.
Terry Eagleton
#5. Something we do know is that review coverage does go to male authors more than women authors. That's a fact. I think it's one of those examples of unconscious bias: If you hire a lot of male journalists, they're more likely to pick up the latest Ian McEwan novel than the latest A.S. Byatt novel.
Emma Donoghue
#6. Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
John Banville
#7. When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.
Deborah Copaken Kogan
#8. Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.
Christopher Hampton
#9. None of us, I think, in the mid-'70s ... would have thought we'd be devoting so much mental space now to confront religion. We thought that matter had long been closed. - Ian McEwan
Alan Sokal
#10. I read everything by Ian McEwan, he is so elegant. I love reading anything about Shakespeare, too. He is my first love. If I had a time machine, I would be hanging out with him.
Kate Fleetwood
#11. I have dipped into Ian McEwan and so on. I tend not to stick with one writer. But I dip in here and there.
John Gimlette
#12. One thing about the fantasy dinner party idea that no one considers is whether these people are going to get on. I would say John McEnroe and Ian McEwan, but what would they have to say to each other?
Robert Webb
#13. 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
#14. No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.
Ian McEwan
#15. Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
Ian McEwan
#16. 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
#17. My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively.
Ian McEwan
#18. 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
#19. The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems.
Ian McEwan
#20. Something has happened, hasn't it? ... It's like being up close to something so large you don't even see it. Even now, I'm not sure I can. But I know it's there.
Ian McEwan
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.
Ian McEwan
#25. Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
Ian McEwan
#26. For love doesn't stand alone, nor can it, but trails like a blazing comet, bringing with it other shining goods - forgiveness, kindness, tolerance, fairness, companionability and friendship, all bound to the love which is at the heart of Jesus's message.
Ian McEwan
#27. .. From there we came to love. We told each other what lovers never tire of hearing and needing to say.
Ian McEwan
#28. No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.
Ian McEwan
#29. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for something, a version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favorite old shoes.
Ian McEwan
#30. Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.
Ian McEwan
#31. My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me.
Ian McEwan
#32. Don't unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth.
Ian McEwan
#33. This, as they used to say, was the side on which her bread was buttered.
Ian McEwan
#34. Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
Ian McEwan
#35. 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
#36. But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were three gins and a bottle of wine
Ian McEwan
#37. I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.
Ian McEwan
#38. How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
Ian McEwan
#39. 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
#40. The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual.
It was difficult to come back.
Ian McEwan
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. The quiet gravity really wasn't his style at all, which had always been both needy and dour; anxious to be liked, but incapable of taking friendliness for granted. A burden of the hugely rich.
Ian McEwan
#45. As we walked back to the car, Johnny said, A tree's one thing, but it's a big deal when you point a gun at someone. Basically, you're giving them permission to kill you.
Ian McEwan
#46. I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, ...
Ian McEwan
#47. In difficult moments it's sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can't, move on to the second best thing.
Ian McEwan
#48. And roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere.
Ian McEwan
#49. It was always the view of my parents ... that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
Ian McEwan
#50. Loud people, especially loud women, always attract enemies
Ian McEwan
#51. We were the only customers downstairs in the shop and there were no windows and only two dim bulbs, without shades. There was a pleasant soporific smell, as though the books had stolen most of the air.
Ian McEwan
#52. For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
Ian McEwan
#53. I was a born empiricist. I believed that writers were paid to pretend, and where appropriate should make use of the real world, the one we all shared, to give plausibility to whatever they had made up.
Ian McEwan
#54. 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
#55. She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn't let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.
Ian McEwan
#56. 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
#57. Words, as I'm beginning to appreciate, can make things true.
Ian McEwan
#58. Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought.
Ian McEwan
#59. Intent on her phone, reading, tapping, frowning in the contemporary manner.
Ian McEwan
#60. So here I am, upside down in a woman.
Ian McEwan
#61. The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you're locked into the human project and you want it to flourish.
Ian McEwan
#62. It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully combine with a sense of obligation.
Ian McEwan
#63. 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
#64. The very word 'history' conjured a dull success of thrones and murderous clerical wrangling.
Ian McEwan
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. The term "teenager" had not long been invented, and it never occured to him that the separateness he felt, which was both painful and delicious, could be shared by anyone else.
Ian McEwan
#69. Briony said reasonably, 'How can you hate plays?'
'It's just showing off.' Pierrot shrugged as he delivered this self-evident truth.
Ian McEwan
#70. 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
#71. At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
Ian McEwan
#72. 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
#73. At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
Ian McEwan
#74. 'Miss Marple' enjoys every minute of her existence and is not worried about getting old.
Geraldine McEwan
#75. But the lovers are locked in, as only lovers can be.
Ian McEwan
#76. The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought.
Ian McEwan
#77. Or he was simply pretending - like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before.
Ian McEwan
#78. At some level you remain an orphan for life; looking after children is one way of looking after yourself.
Ian McEwan
#79. Children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.
Ian McEwan
#80. She continued down the stairs. She should have advised Lola to change in order to conceal the scratch on her arm.
Ian McEwan
#81. No one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.
Ian McEwan
#82. Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.
Ian McEwan
#83. The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.
Ian McEwan
#84. By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State
Ian McEwan
#85. Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.
Ian McEwan
#86. She could have phoned one of three friends, but she could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real.
Ian McEwan
#87. However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you're inside them.
Ian McEwan
#88. Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.
Ian McEwan
#89. Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.
Ian McEwan
#90. 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
#91. Above the rush-hour din it was her ideal self she heard, the pianist she could never become, performing faultlessly Bach's second partita.
Ian McEwan
#92. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.
Ian McEwan
#93. I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
Ian McEwan
#94. Clive was losing sensation in his feet, and as he stamped them the rhythm gave him back the ten note falling figure, ritardando, a cor anglais, and rising softly against it, contrapuntally, cellos in mirror image. Her face in it. The end.
Ian McEwan
#96. A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken
Ian McEwan
#97. She had never lost that childhood pleasure in seeing pages covered in her own handwriting.
Ian McEwan
#98. Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
Ian McEwan
#99. 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
#100. Lingering here, bored and comfortable, was a form of self-punishment tinged with pleasure, or the expectation of it; if she went away something bad might happen or, worse, something good, something she could not afford to miss.
Ian McEwan
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