Ian Mcewan Quotes

186 quotes in 2464 categories

• What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?
• Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
• Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.
• But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
• Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information,
• What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
• All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing…
• Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.
• Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
• What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.
• I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant…
• 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…
• Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.
• She loved him, though not at this particular moment.
• There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics...
• 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…
• The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
• By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their…
• By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State
• You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of…

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