Ian Mcewan Quotes (67 Quotes)

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.

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

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.

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

That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.

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.

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

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,

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.

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State's crime when it sets out to crush that individuality.

This was a tough decision, but it was driven by our need for higher temperatures. This is not a cost-cutting measure.

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.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

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.

I now bear a kind of stigmata. I am in the computer as having been denied entry to the United States and that is really bad news. They can put things into that computer, but they never take them out.

One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.

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.