527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they’re innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.

Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal.

Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on.

It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.

The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation – it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.

This unreal feeling was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street, more or less the same as the one she had left behind. That was all London was beyond its center, an agglomeration of dull little towns. She made a resolution never to live in any of them.

When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in-you know, a girl I’ve just met, or this song we’regoing to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto – think small.

Someone once asked me “If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?” And I said “No, thanks, I think I’ll stick at this.”