Ian McEwan quotes: top 476 famous quotes by Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

“It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.”

— 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

“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

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

“I often don't read reviews.”

— Ian McEwan

“I'm quite good at not writing.”

— 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

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

— 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 story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken”

— Ian McEwan

“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

“There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.”

— Ian McEwan

Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.

— Ian McEwan

“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

“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

“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

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.

— 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

“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

Was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?

— Ian McEwan

“How quickly the dead faded into each other,”

— Ian McEwan

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

— Ian McEwan

“Her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect.”

— Ian McEwan

“It's hilarious to recognize how completely another person resembles your imperfect self.”

— Ian McEwan

“How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect?”

— 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

“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

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

— Ian McEwan

The novel is too capacious, inclusive, unruly, and personal for perfection. Too long, sometimes too much like life.

— Ian McEwan

“A baton of light across the bracken redeemed the reputation of the color brown with fiery reds and yellows.”

— Ian McEwan

“Intent on her phone, reading, tapping, frowning in the contemporary manner.”

— Ian McEwan

“Even a trashy movie can make you cry. There were deep emotional reactions that ducked the censure of the higher reasoning processes and forced us to enact, however vestigially, our roles - me, the indignant secret lover revealed; Clarissa the woman cruelly betrayed.”

— Ian McEwan

How can one understand the inner life of a character, real or fictional, without knowing the state of her finances?

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

“Welfare was not to be gauged in purely financial terms, or merely by reference to physical comfort. Welfare, happiness, well-being must embrace the philosophical concept of the good life. She listed some relevant ingredients, goals towards which a child might grow. Economic and moral freedom, virtue, compassion and altruism, satisfying work through engagement with demanding tasks, a flourishing network of personal relationships, earning the esteem of others, pursuing larger meanings to one's existence, and having at the center of one's life one or a small number of significant relations defined above all by love.”

— Ian McEwan

Perhaps she would become one of those women, pitied or envied, who chose not to have children.

— Ian McEwan

“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

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

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

“And this was to be his main point-there was one overriding reason for our failure, which was the lack of coordinated intelligence. Too many agencies, too many bureaucracies defending their corners, too many points of demarcation, insufficient centralized control.”

— Ian McEwan

“Either I've always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don't know what it means.”

— Ian McEwan

“And she could hear a sound, rising steadily, not in steps like a scale, but in a slow glissando, and not quite a violin or a voice, but somewhere in between, rising and rising unbearably, without ever leaving the audible range, a violin-voice that was just on the edge of making sense, telling her something urgent in sibilants and vowels more primitive than words. It may have been inside the room, or out in the corridor, or only in her ears, like tinnitus. She may even have been making the noise herself. She did not care - she had to get out.”

— Ian McEwan

“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

“By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State”

— Ian McEwan

“I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I've learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you've done before.”