Ian Mcewan Quotes - Page 3

Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?

When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion.

In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.

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

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.

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

I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.

Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.

Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence

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

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.

Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.

Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning.

I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.

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.

I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.

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

If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.

How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.