Ian McEwan Quotes

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.

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.

She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.

They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return - they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other's eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped away.

She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.

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. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.

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.

See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That’s what God’s love does. If you’re beginning to feel uncomfortable now, it’s because the changes in you are already beginning to happen and one day you’ll be glad to say, Deliver me from meaninglessness.

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

Clive was losing sensation in his feet, and as he stamped them the rhythm gave him back the ten note falling figure, ritardando, a cor anglais, and rising softly against it, contrapuntally, cellos in mirror image. Her face in it. The end.

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

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.

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

In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition.

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.

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

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

…the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.

She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations.

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

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.

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,

Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intention, is human, normal, and we should forgive ourselves. But the raised hand, the actual violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There’ll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation. It’s a reversion to constant, visceral fear.

Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of the skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminished toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf--a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.

Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?

He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.

It's a matter of dishonour, and when it gets out, which it's bound to, this will be the one act you'll be remembered for. Everything else you achieved will be irrelevant. Your reputation will rest only on this, because ultimately reality is social, it's among others that we have to live and their judgements matter. - Pg. 198

He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.

It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid—and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place.

It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully combine with a sense of obligation.

He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.

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. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air

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

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.

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

I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!

When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh.

It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.

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?

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

All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?

Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.

When she found a place of her ownand packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear,"He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she’s there all day.

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.

In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I'd type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a professional to type a final draft, but I felt I was missing things I would have changed if I had done it myself. In the mid-eighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems a gross mechanical obstruction. I like the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer's memory - like an unspoken thought. I like the way sentences or passages can be endlessly reworked, and the way this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself. Until, of course, it sulks and crashes.

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.

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

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.

How quickly the dead faded into each other,

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

While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew.

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

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.

Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word.

But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed she would open her legs to me

Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.

I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness...Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self...God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me – they were all aged – I worried that what showed in my face was pity.