Top 228 Quotes & Sayings by Ian Mcewan - Page 3

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

She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.

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

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.

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

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."

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.

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.

But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.

Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.

She loved him, though not at this particular moment.

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.

All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

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

The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.

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.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

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.

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.

But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.

I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.

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

These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.

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.

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.

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.

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.

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

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

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

And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.

When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.

However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.

come back, come back to me

All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.

In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.

My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end.

It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.

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

I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.

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

Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.

The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back.

What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

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.

What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

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.

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.

In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: 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. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled.

Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

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.

Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

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.

And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?

In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.