527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

Love doesn’t grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.

We’ll always be troubled by how things are – that’s how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.

The United States-It’s nervous poplulation obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun.

Florence suspected that there was something profoundly wrong with her, that she had always been different, and that at last she was about to be exposed. Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust: her whole being was in revolt against the prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.

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.

There’s a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged.

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel – especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.