527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

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.

See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That’s what God’s love does. If you’re beginning to feel uncomfortable now, it’s because the changes in you are already beginning to happen and one day you’ll be glad to say, Deliver me from meaninglessness.

...I experienced a sudden ache -- part desolation, part panic -- to observe the speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person.

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.

People sometimes forget how to be happy due to a "failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal footing. That was the only moral a story must have.

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

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.

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 buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to.