527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions.

Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not.

Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour, and even the precise manner in which they became lost expressed their cumulative choices, their will.

A contempt for things, for order, cleanliness, must lie on a spectrum with scorn for laws, values, for life itself. What is a criminal but a disordered spirit?

From where I am, you and my mother and the world are all one. Hyperbole, I know. The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it. And I love and admire you both. What I’m saying is, I’m fearful of rejection.