Mcewan Quotes & Sayings

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

Selfishness is also written on our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict - what to give to others, and what to keep for yourself. — Ian McEwan

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

This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure. — Ian McEwan

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born. — Ian McEwan

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

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

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

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

Or he was simply pretending - like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before. — Ian McEwan

So here I am, upside down in a woman. — Ian McEwan

Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel. When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping an aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme. — Ian McEwan

People sometimes forget how to be happy due to a failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal footing. That was the only moral a story must have. — Ian McEwan

I'll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan. — David Bowie

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

Self persuasion was a concept much loved by evolutionary psychologists. I had written a piece about it for an Australian magazine. It was pure armchair science, and it went like this: if you lived in a group, like humans have always done, persuading others of your own needs and interests would be fundamental to your well-being. Sometimes you had to use cunning. Clearly you would be at your most convincing if you persuaded yourself first and did not even have to pretend to believe what you were saying. The kind of self-deluding individuals who tended to do this flourished, as did their genes. So it was we squabbled and scrapped, for our unique intelligence was always at the service of our special pleading and selective blindness to the weakness of our case. — Ian McEwan

None of us really either know the circumstances of our death or are likely to exert as much control over it as we would like to, but we can certainly have a little more say in it if we are terminally ill than we have at the moment. That's the element of dignity, but sure, life is very hard to organise even when you are fit and healthy. — Ian McEwan

Perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. 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. — Ian McEwan

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

Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god. — Ian McEwan

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

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

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

Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not. — Ian McEwan

Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought. — Ian McEwan

A baton of light across the bracken redeemed the reputation of the color brown with fiery reds and yellows. — Ian McEwan

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

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

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare. — Ruth Rendell

It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone. — Ian McEwan

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

McEwan's Atonement ... truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past ... . The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel ... . There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes - the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression - into his narrative, and in a magical love scene. — Noah Richler

In one lifetime it wouldn't be possible to find another woman with whom he can learn to be so free, whom he can please with such abandon and expertise. By some accident of character, it's familiarity that excites him more than sexual novelty. He supects there's something numbed or deficient or timid in himself ( ... ) [M]ight look like virtue or doggedness, but it's neither of these because he exercises no real choice. This is what he has to have: possession, belonging, repetition. — Ian McEwan

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

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

How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect? — Ian McEwan

I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between - I gave them all the same rough treatment. — Ian McEwan

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

As he pushed her by the shoulder toward the gate, the rising howl commenced. Nightmares had beome a science. Someone, a mere human, had taken the time to dream up this satanic howling. And what success! It was the sound of panic itself, mounting and straining toward the extinction they all knew, individually, to be theirs. It was a sound you were obliged to take personally. — 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 now came another old theme: self-blame. She was selfish, crabbed, drily ambitious. Pursuing her own ends, pretending to herself that her career was not in essence self-gratification, denying an existence to two or three warm and talented individuals. Had her children lived, it would have been shocking to think they might not have. And so here was her punishment, to face this disaster alone, without sensible grown-up children, concerned and phoning, downing tools and rallying round for urgent kitchen-table conferences, talking sense to their stupid father, bringing him back. But would she take him in? — 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

How do you feel?'
Scared,' she said. 'Really scared.'
But you don't look it.'
I feel I'm shivering inside. — Ian McEwan

What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one's literary standards should be. ... a tour de force by one of England's best novelists ... . Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel - and more satisfying ... - than anything McEwan has written ... .sublimely written narrative ... . The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own. ... — Noah Richler

Regarding yourself as a highly rational and compassionate being does not make you rational and compassionate in all circumstances. — Ian McEwan

To take up the violin or any instrument was an act of hope, it implied a future. — Ian McEwan

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

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

Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition. — Ian McEwan

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

She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity? — Ian McEwan

Drowned in the lake, ravished by gypsies, struck by a passing motor car, she thought ritually, a sound principle being that nothing was ever as one imagined it, and this was an efficient means of excluding the worst. — Ian McEwan

I've spent all my life playing roles that illustrious people have played before me. — Geraldine McEwan

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

He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life. — 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

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

If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy. — Ian McEwan

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

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

Intent on her phone, reading, tapping, frowning in the contemporary manner. — Ian McEwan

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

Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember. — Ian McEwan

Children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival. — Ian McEwan

He thought about telling them of his own single, haunting detail. But he didn't want to add to the horror, and nor did he want to give life to the image while it remained at a distance, held there by wine and companionship. — 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

Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties. — Ian McEwan

What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife. — Ian McEwan

The conversation had turned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other — Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters. — John Banville

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

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

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

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

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands. — Ian McEwan

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

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

As in Northern Ireland, children, shoppers, ordinary working men were all suitable targets. Bombs in department stores and pubs would have even more impact in the context of the widely anticipated social breakdown brought on by industrial decline, high unemployment, rising inflation and an energy crisis. — Ian McEwan

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

She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore. — Ian McEwan

They knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches. As individuals they didn't easily take offense; but together they managed to offend each other in surprising, unexpected ways; then the offender - it had happened twice since their arrival - became irritated by the cloying susceptibilities of the other, and they would continue to explore the twisting alleyways and sudden squares in silence, and with each step the city would recede as they locked tighter into each other's presence. — 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

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

Other women cloy/The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry/Where most she satisfies. — Ian McEwan

He was happy and therefore bound to succeed. — Ian McEwan

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

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

When love dies and 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. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light. — Ian McEwan

He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now. — Ian McEwan

He wasn't offended. She was the one who was over-interpreting, and jittery in his presence, and she was annoyed with herself. — Ian McEwan

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

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

He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit. — Ian McEwan

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

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

But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper. — Ian McEwan

Well, PZ Myers, Jen McCreight, Phil Plait, Amanda Marcotte, Greg Laden, Melissa McEwan and others have all already said it, but I figured I should post this for the record: yes, Richard Dawkins believes I should be a good girl and just shut up about being sexually objectified because it doesn't bother him. Thanks, wealthy old heterosexual white man! — Rebecca Watson

She lay in the dark and knew everything. — Ian McEwan