Ian Mcewan Quotes
-
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
→ -
What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.
→ -
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
→ -
I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.
→ -
Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.
→ -
At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.
→ -
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.
→ -
At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
→ -
...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
→ -
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.
→ -
Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.
→ -
She bent her finger and then 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. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending... . And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind.
→ -
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.
→ -
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?
→ -
Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
→ -
No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
→ -
Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.
→ -
I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'
→ -
one could drown in irrelevance.
→ -
...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.
→ -
Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
→ -
I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.
→ -
My biggest fear, I think falling from a great height. If I want to keep myself awake at night I imagine I'm on the top of the North or South Tower in 9/11, wondering whether I'm going to be burnt to death or I'm going to jump. And I think I would burn to death. And yet I'm impressed by the fact that hundreds didn't.
→ -
I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.
→ -
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.
→ -
I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.
→ -
Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.
→ -
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
→ -
And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
→ -
Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.
→
Related Authors
-
Zadie Smith Novelist -
Saoirse Ronan Actress -
Doris Lessing Novelist -
Salman Rushdie Novelist -
Virginia Woolf Writer -
Philip Roth Novelist -
Don DeLillo Writer -
Margaret Atwood Poet -
Annalena McAfee Author -
Paul Auster Author -
Joe Wright Film director -
David Mitchell Novelist -
James McAvoy Actor -
Graham Swift Film writer -
John Banville Novelist -
Martin Amis Novelist -
J. M. Coetzee Novelist -
Ian Rankin Crime writer -
Julian Barnes Writer -
Kazuo Ishiguro Novelist