Ian McEwan Quotes

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might...

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

One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any fra...

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent...

If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be tru...

...they knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many su...

Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.

She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself ...

...children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.

He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to r...

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand th...

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. O...

…the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped...

I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.

Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave ma...

In difficult moments it’s sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing...

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hand...

Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a Lon...

You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily...

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single ...

I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it...

But this inglorious revolution wasn't for me. I didn't want a sex shop in every town.

These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly a...

While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were...

It's a matter of dishonour, and when it gets out, which it's bound to, this will be the one act you'...

Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.

At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself u...

He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack ...

He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would b...

He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a...

You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to ...

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in t...

It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and ther...

It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and dis...

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

It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineff...

Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages—he's good company, expansi...

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscio...

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

Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade him...

When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of ...

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

When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like so...

She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how t...

Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose.

Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we lo...

There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in t...

So here I am, upside down in a woman.

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

When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial re...

Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intent...

I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness...Adversity forced awareness on us, and ...

But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted he...

The light of artistic creation is also blinding.The artist can’t see the suffering he causesto those...

See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That’s what God’s love does. If you’re beginning to ...

When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to k...

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

It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my cl...

But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I ...

Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't h...

...I experienced a sudden ache -- part desolation, part panic -- to observe the speed with which thi...

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative len...

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare sp...

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

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send though...

Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily ...

Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a who...

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civili...

Every secret of the body was rendered up--bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an inte...

The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surroundin...

How quickly the dead faded into each other,

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience f...

It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way t...

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as...

Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is...

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had be...

When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary lif...

The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have...

We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth

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

They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but ob...

Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world.

He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not livi...

It was always the view of my parents," Emily said, "that hot weather encouraged loose morals among y...

He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.

Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheap...

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

These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he...

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at...

She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They...

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply lik...

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that wo...

The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy ...

She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing...

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social w...

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

She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividin...

When she found a place of her ownand packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and ...