Ian McEwan quotes - page 5

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. (Ian McEwan)
What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike? View quote
Ian McEwan
I often don't read reviews. View quote
Ian McEwan
Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race. View quote
Ian McEwan
Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god. View quote
Ian McEwan
I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force. View quote
Ian McEwan
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew. View quote
Ian McEwan
In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot. View quote
Ian McEwan
I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive. View quote
Ian McEwan
If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy. View quote
Ian McEwan
And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage. (Ian McEwan)
The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it. View quote
Ian McEwan
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? View quote
Ian McEwan
I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence. View quote
Ian McEwan
Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes. View quote
Ian McEwan
It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now. View quote
Ian McEwan
She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime. View quote
Ian McEwan
London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who had started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right. View quote
Ian McEwan
I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.' View quote
Ian McEwan
What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely. View quote
Ian McEwan
He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse. (Ian McEwan)
The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject. View quote
Ian McEwan
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. View quote
Ian McEwan
Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret. View quote
Ian McEwan
It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning. View quote
Ian McEwan