527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

  • Author Ian McEwan
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    One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.

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  • Author Ian McEwan
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    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.

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  • Author Ian McEwan
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    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.

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  • Author Ian McEwan
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    You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

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  • Author Ian McEwan
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    I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

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  • Author Ian McEwan
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    I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.

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  • Author Ian McEwan
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    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.

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  • Author Ian McEwan
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    Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.

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