Ian McEwan Quotes & Sayings

The evil I'm talking about lives in us all. It takes hold in an individual, in private lives, within a family, adn then it's children who suffer most. And then, when teh conditions are right, in different countries, at different times, a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts, and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within himself. Then it sinks back and waits. It's something in our hearts. — Ian McEwan

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us. — Ian McEwan

Work - the ultimate badge of health. — Ian McEwan

And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. Africa — Ian McEwan

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

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. — Ian McEwan

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

Other tokens of maturity included a velvet choker of tiny pearls, the ginger tresses gathered at the nape and secured with an emerald clasp, three loose silver bracelets around a freckled wrist, and the fact that whenever she moved, the air about her tasted of rose water. — Ian McEwan

Get in first and shape the terms. — Ian McEwan

I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself. — Ian McEwan

Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous. For a while, the case had left her numb, caring less, feeling less, going about her business, telling no one. But she became squeamish about bodies, barely able to look at her own or Jack's without feeling repelled. How was she to talk about this? Hardly plausible, to have told him that at this stage of a legal career, this one case among so many others, its sadness, its visceral — Ian McEwan

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

Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They're not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they'll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want. — Ian McEwan

At her elbow was a slim pile of creamy white paper beside which she laid down her pen. It was only then, at the sight of these clean sheets, that the last traces, the stain, of her own situation vanished completely. She no longer had a private life, she was ready to be absorbed. — Ian McEwan

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

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home
Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else? — Ian McEwan

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

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing. — Ian McEwan

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

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

My own small discovery has been that this change is possible, it is within our power. Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're going to be at peace with each other, I'm not saying it'll happen. There's a good chance it won't. I'm saying it's our only chance. — Ian McEwan

She had a difficult case beginning in half an hour, a set of complicated marital claims and counterclaims that were set to absorb two weeks of her life. Both parties intended to remain exceedingly rich at the expense of the other. This was not the moment for poetry. — Ian McEwan

To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. — Ian McEwan

This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can't bring him to this. Working with others is one part of it, but it's not all. This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills, pressure, problems to be solved, even danger. He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist. It's a feeling of clarified emptiness, of deep, muted joy. — Ian McEwan

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

There was never a time when he thought he was fully himself, and besides, he soon forgot that self and settled into a state of mild and extended psychosis... — Ian McEwan

It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish can feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. — Ian McEwan

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

There is a compassion in rational thought that is sometimes missing in religious conviction. — Ian McEwan

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

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

When anything can happen, everything matters. — Ian McEwan

She belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ. — Ian McEwan

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

Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race. — Ian McEwan

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

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

She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. — Ian McEwan

She lit up as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas about where a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply - notions as self evident to him as natural justice. Three years among the sophisticates of Girton had not provided her with courage to confront him. — Ian McEwan

But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things. — Ian McEwan

By some magic reversal, everything spectacularly useless filled the drawer intended for practical tools. What could you do with a single piece of jigsaw? But, on the other hand, did you dare throw it away? — Ian McEwan

I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists. — Ian McEwan

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

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

There was[is] something seriously wrong with the world for which neither God nor His absence could be blamed. — Ian McEwan

But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were three gins and a bottle of wine — Ian McEwan

Early in my conscious life one of my fingers, not then subject to my influence, brushed past a shrimp-like protuberance between my legs. And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem. — Ian McEwan

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

He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. [ ... ] Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know. — Ian McEwan

Over a quarter of a century ago she and Vernon had made a household for almost a year, in a tiny rooftop flat on the rue de Seine. There were always damp towels on the floor then, and cataracts of her underwear tumbling from drawers she never closed, a big ironing board that was never folded away, and in the one overfilled wardrobe dresses , crushed and shouldering sideways like commuters on the metro. Magazines, makeup, bank statements, bead necklaces, flowers, knickers, ashtrays, invitations, tampons, LPs, airplane tickets, high heeled shoes- not a single surface was left uncovered by something of Molly's, so that when Vernon was meant to be working at home, he took to writing in a cafe along the street. And yet each morning she arose fresh from the shell of this girly squalor, like a Botticelli Venus, to present herself, not naked, of course, but sleekly groomed, at the offices of Paris Vogue. — Ian McEwan

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

He would change my life and behave with selfless cruelty as he prepared to set out on a journey with no hope of return. — Ian McEwan

The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future, — Ian McEwan

Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious? — Ian McEwan

They would also need to talk sense to her. The almost-existing children, the husky-voiced daughter, a museum curator perhaps, and the gifted, less settled son, good at too many things, who failed to complete his university course, but a far better pianist than she. Both always affectionate, brilliant at Christmases and summer-holiday castles and entertaining their youngest relations. — Ian McEwan

At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year. — Ian McEwan

A gated community of a historical sort, a fortress of barristers and judges who were also musicians, wine fanciers, would-be writers, fly fishermen and raconteurs. A nest of gossip and expertise, and a delightful garden still haunted by the reasonable spirit of Francis Bacon. She loved it here and never wanted to leave. — Ian McEwan

Here were the luxury and priviledge of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes and progress for the rest. [He] owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted that all we had made was rotten, never thought to pose alternatives, never derived hope from friendship, love, free markets, industry, technology, trade, and all the arts and sciences. — Ian McEwan

And there was something I've since noticed over the years - the mountain range that separates the naked from the clothed man. Two men on one passport. — Ian McEwan

This sense of absence had been growing ... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity...He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist. — Ian McEwan

A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit. Another was a passion for secrets... — Ian McEwan

I squeezed her hand and said nothing. I knew little about Keats or his poetry, but I thought it possible that in his hopeless situation he would not have wanted to write precisely because he loved her so much. Lately I'd had the idea that Clarissa's interest in these hypothetical letters had something to do with our own situation, and with her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect. In the months after we'd met, and before we'd bought the apartment, she had written me some beauties, passionately abstract in the ways our love was different from and superior to any that had ever existed. Perhaps that's the essence of a love letter, to celebrate the unique. I had tried to match her, but all that sincerity would permit me were the facts, and they seemed miraculous enough to me: a beautiful woman loved and wanted to be loved by a large, clumsy, balding fellow who could hardly believe his luck. — Ian McEwan

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

And roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. — Ian McEwan

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

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience. — Ian McEwan

However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you're inside them. — Ian McEwan

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

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

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other. — Ian McEwan

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

Anyone watching me might have thought I was consulting a reference book, I turned the pages so fast. 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 shoes ... For it was my best self I wanted ... — Ian McEwan

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

Now time, afternoon time, which in the Midi is as elemental as air and light, expanded and rolled billowingly outwards across the rest of the day, and upwards to the vaults of the cobalt sky, freeing everyone in its delicious sprawl from their obligations. — Ian McEwan

She loved him, though not at this particular moment. — Ian McEwan

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

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

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

Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn. — Ian McEwan

He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to. — Ian McEwan

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

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

He doesn't trouble himself with closing the shutter - total darkness, sense deprivation, might activate his thoughts. Better to stare at something and hope to feel his eyelids grow heavy. Already, his tiredness seems fragile or unreliable, like a pain that comes and goes. He needs to nurture it, and to avoid thoughts at all costs. — Ian McEwan

Steve Earle, the thinking man's Bruce Springsteen, — Ian McEwan

And he saw the studio he was about to abandon for his bed as it might have appeared in a documentary film about himself that would reveal to a curious world how a masterpiece was born. — 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

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

A rather insistent cross-examiner asks a pathologist whether he can be absolutely sure that a certain patient was dead before he began the autopsy. The pathologist says he's absolutely certain. Oh, but how can you be so sure? Because, the pathologist says, his brain was in a jar sitting on my desk. But, says the cross-examiner, could the patient still have been alive nevertheless? Well, comes the answer, it's possible he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere. — Ian McEwan

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

I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress. — 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

It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection. — Ian McEwan

In fact, as I get older, I begin to feel that actually what we need more in the world is doubt; more skepticism, less crazed certainty ... People who know the answer and are going to impose it on everybody else, I think, are terrifying people. — Ian McEwan

The homely and erotic patters of marriage are not easily discarded. — Ian McEwan

This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue ... So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision ... it already has the quality of an idea ... unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself. — Ian McEwan

In those first moments it was easier to conceal a confusion of feeling behind a motherly tone — Ian McEwan

That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away. — Ian McEwan

Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through the dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric,' a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation,' the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a 'cursory' journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the 'hieroglyph' of his displeasure. — Ian McEwan

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

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