Ian Mcewan famous quotes

...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Falling In Love #Fall #Glances

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

#Love #Believe #Doubt

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

#Beautiful #Daughter #Believe

A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Torn #Materials #Persons

The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Curiosity #World #Might

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

#Teacher #Stupid #School

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

#Dream #Return #Cost

There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Expression #Self #Giving

When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Lost Love #Fighting #Suffering

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

#Depression #Nails #Firsts

It is 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

#Lying #Heart #Body

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Writing #Stronger #Might

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

#Thinking #Feet #World

The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
-- Ian Mcewan

#World #Notes #Should

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Imagination #Fabulous

What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Identical

Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Religious #Art #Simple

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

#Life #Real #Simple

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

#Sweet #Teenage #Distance

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

#Light #Darkness #Everyday

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

#Mean #Feelings #Mind

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

#Writing #Imagination #Fancy

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

#Children #Groups #Close Friends

I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Successful #Rocks #Guitar

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

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Men #Ice #White

A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken
-- Ian Mcewan

#Stories #Gestures #Made

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

#Lying #Thinking #Psychosis

Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Opportunity #Class #Betrayed

Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Love You #Shame

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

#Views #Talking #Years

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Hands #Band #Variation

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

#Simple #Thinking #Names

From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Simple #Perspective #Intimate

one could drown in irrelevance.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Irrelevance

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Father #Garden #Growth

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

#Powerful #Character #Fate

The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Psychosis #Luxury #Safety

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

#Voice #Phones #Long

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Self #Stories #Impatience

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

#Spring #Racing #Labyrinth

I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Intelligent #Temptation #Shadow

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

#Strong #Past #Bully

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Sleep #Night #Lunch

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

#Lying #Self #Ice

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

#Gratitude #Regret #Men

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

#Summer #Morning #Rivers

Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Taken #Simple #Years

Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution
-- Ian Mcewan

#Ideas #Execution #Chasms

My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Fall #Believe #Character

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are?
-- Ian Mcewan

#Children #Growing Up #Memories

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information,
-- Ian Mcewan

#Narrative #Information #Withholding Information

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
-- Ian Mcewan

#Attitude #Want #Strikes

All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Thinking #Views #Political

Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Self #Joy #Consciousness

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

#People #Justice #Asking

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State
-- Ian Mcewan

#Individuality #Novelists #States

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

#Feelings #Shrinking #Moments

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

#Not Sure

No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Squirrels #Skulls #Bed

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Mad #Let Me

was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?
-- Ian Mcewan

#Denial #Modern #Term

Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.
-- Ian Mcewan

#Thinking #Light #Mad

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

#Memories #War #Sight

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

#Fall #Simple #Safety

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

#Fate #Law #Sky

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

#Weather #Suspicion #Acknowledge

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

#Heart #Darkness #Lines

Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?
-- Ian Mcewan

#Doe #Inevitable

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

#Liars #Moving #Deception

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

#Girl #Believe #Cutting

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

#Dream #Simple #People

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

#Men #Interesting #Relax