527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There’s a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.

But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill...

Religions, moral systems, her own included, wee like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great ditance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was to judge?

This was still the era – it would end later in that famous decade – when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.

We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage.

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

It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.

Selfishness is also written on our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict – what to give to others, and what to keep for yourself.

The thing about Satan is that he’s amazingly sophisticated. He puts a stupid idea like satanic whatever, abuse, into people’s minds, then he lets it get disproved so everyone thinks that he doesn’t exist after all, and then he’s free to do his worst.