Quotes by Ian Mcewan

“These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. a...”

“Either I've always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don't know what it means.”

“She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldnt let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.”

“This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theos sincerely...”

“He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff bu...”

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

“I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. T...”

“She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation...”

“When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, r...”

“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 o...”

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

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

“It's a matter of dishonour, and when it gets out, which it's bound to, this will be the one act you'll be remembered for. Everything else you achieved will be irrelevant. Your reputation will rest ...”

“I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.”

“The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single wo...”

“I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!”

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

“They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabri...”

“Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air”

“But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed she would open her legs to me”