Top 100 Mcewan's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. So, one-third of the time it's a bad idea to move, which means that two-thirds of the time it's a good idea.
Ian McEwan
#4. Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.
Ian McEwan
#5. When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation.
Ian McEwan
#6. I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.
Ian McEwan
#7. Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
Ian McEwan
#8. All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?
Ian McEwan
#9. God's love may take the form of wrath. It can show itself to us as a calamity. This is the difficult lesson its taken me a lifetime to learn.
Ian McEwan
#10. You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
Ian McEwan
#11. Beyond a certain age, a journey across the city becomes uncomfortably reflective ... One day I too will prompt a moment's reflection in the passenger of a passing cab.
Ian McEwan
#12. That naked childlike surrender, before she rose to assume an adult's armour, seemed first thing this morning like a essential from which she was banished.
Ian McEwan
#13. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it's tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes.
Ian McEwan
#14. It's hilarious to recognize how completely another person resembles your imperfect self.
Ian McEwan
#15. Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.
Ian McEwan
#16. Is he about to become that man, that modern fool of a certain age, who finds himself pausing by shop windows to stare in at the saxophones or the motorbikes, or driven to find himself a mistress of his daughter's age?
Ian McEwan
#17. 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
#18. Steve Earle, the thinking man's Bruce Springsteen,
Ian McEwan
#19. It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in.
Ian McEwan
#20. See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That's what God's love does. If you're beginning to feel uncomfortable now, it's because the changes in you are already beginning to happen and one day you'll be glad to say, Deliver me from meaninglessness.
Ian McEwan
#21. He's weak and ignorant, scared of the way consequences of an action leap away from your control and breed new events, new consequences, until you're led to a place you never dreamed of and would never choose - a knife at the throat.
Ian McEwan
#22. For all the discerning talk, it's the close at hand, the visible that exerts the overpowering force. And what we don't see ...
Ian McEwan
#23. There was something fascinating about tall thin men, the way their bones and Adam's apple lurked so unconcealed beneath the skin, their birdlike faces, their predatory stoop.
Ian McEwan
#24. When she found a place of her own
and packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear,
He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she's there all day.
Ian McEwan
#25. The reason he wouldn't be drawn into political or even theological debate was that he was indifferent to other people's opinions and felt no urge to engage with or oppose them.
Ian McEwan
#26. Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson's Clarissa.
Ian McEwan
#27. Get in first and shape the terms. He did so in quick short sentences, his smooth tenor's voice as clear and precise as it was when he sang Goethe's tragic poem.
Ian McEwan
#28. He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.
Ian McEwan
#29. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you.
Ian McEwan
#30. The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
Ian McEwan
#31. He found and praised Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat. I said I found it too schematic and preferred The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. He nodded, but not in agreement, it seemed, more like a therapist who now understood my problem.
Ian McEwan
#32. Your reputation will rest only on this, because ultimately reality is social, it's among others that we have to live and their judgments matter.
Ian McEwan
#33. One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.
Ian McEwan
#34. Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it's a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.
Ian McEwan
#35. I made the enthusiast's mistake of assuming that everyone shared my previous ignorance.
Ian McEwan
#36. Now I must listen again to Claude's set piece on menu terms, as if he's the first ever to spot these unimportant absurdities. He lingers on "pan-fried." What is pan but a deceitful benediction on the vulgar and unhealthy fried?
Ian McEwan
#37. It's shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum's sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?
Ian McEwan
#38. One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.
Ian McEwan
#39. 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
#40. We've built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It's dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.
Ian McEwan
#41. The thing about Satan is that he's amazingly sophisticated. He puts a stupid idea like satanic whatever, abuse, into people's minds, then he lets it get disproved so everyone thinks that he doesn't exist after all, and then he's free to do his worst.
Ian McEwan
#42. The abandonment was delicious. Something was pouring out of him, through his palm and into hers; something was spreading back up his arm, across his chest, constricting his throat. His only thought was a repetition: so this is it, it's like this, so this is it ...
Ian McEwan
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. It's a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get.
Ian McEwan
#46. The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had.
Ian McEwan
#47. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning,
Ian McEwan
#48. In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree ... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.
Ian McEwan
#49. 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
#50. She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked.
Ian McEwan
#51. I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.
Ian McEwan
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. This, as they used to say, was the side on which her bread was buttered.
Ian McEwan
#57. Don't unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth.
Ian McEwan
#58. 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
#59. Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.
Ian McEwan
#60. 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
#61. No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.
Ian McEwan
#62. .. From there we came to love. We told each other what lovers never tire of hearing and needing to say.
Ian McEwan
#63. 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
#64. Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
Ian McEwan
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
Ian McEwan
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
Ian McEwan
#78. Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.
Ian McEwan
#79. 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
#80. No one's been in the kitchen since he left it. On the table are his cup, Theo's empty water bottle and, beside it, the remote control. It's stil faintly surprising, this fidelity of objects, sometimes reassuring, sometimes sinister.
Ian McEwan
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose.
Ian McEwan
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. It is the world that shapes people's minds. It is men who have shaped the world. So women's minds are shaped by men. From earliest childhood, the world they see is made by men. Now the women lie to themselves and there is confusion and unhappiness everywhere.
Ian McEwan
#88. Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent - how the tilt of a skull could change a life! - Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony's manuscript from
Ian McEwan
#89. 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
#90. As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.
Ian McEwan
#91. It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
Ian McEwan
#92. It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.
Ian McEwan
#93. Unlike in Daisy's novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.
Ian McEwan
#94. These hands are steady enough, but they are large. Had he been a proper pianist - he's dabbled inexpertly - his ten-note span might be of use.
Ian McEwan
#95. It's beautiful here and we're still unhappy
Ian McEwan
#97. 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
#98. No one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.
Ian McEwan
#99. Briony said reasonably, 'How can you hate plays?'
'It's just showing off.' Pierrot shrugged as he delivered this self-evident truth.
Ian McEwan
#100. 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
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