527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

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.

I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.

The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you're locked into the human project and you want it to flourish.

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 God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

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

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.

I don't really believe in evil at all.