Ian Mcewan Quotes

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.

No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.

The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.

When anything can happen, everything matters.

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.

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.

I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.

When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in - you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto - think small.

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

There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.

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

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

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

I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are?

He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

Someone once asked me "If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?" And I said "No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this."

one could drown in irrelevance.

The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.

Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.

Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.