Quotes from Ian Mcewan

He found and praised Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat . I said I found it too schematic and preferred The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . He nodded, but not in agreement, it seemed, more like a therapist who now understood my problem.

While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew.

His wives had discovered early on what a poor or frightening prospect of a father he presented and they had protected themselves and got out.

He would change my life and behave with selfless cruelty as he prepared to set out on a journey with no hope of return.

Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was?

In Leon's life, or rather, in his account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed. Everyone was celebrated at least in some degree, as though it was a cause for wonder that anyone existed at all.

Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.

Now time, afternoon time, which in the Midi is as elemental as air and light, expanded and rolled billowingly outwards across the rest of the day, and upwards to the vaults of the cobalt sky, freeing everyone in its delicious sprawl from their obligations.

He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy. Poison, in preserved form, to be used against you long into the future.

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return

A dirty, joyous, bare-limbed freedom, which rose in his imagination like a vast airy cathedral, ruined perhaps, roofless, fan-vaulted to the skies, where they would weightlessly drift upward in a powerful embrace...

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

It's about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that's to come. It will happen. With improvements over time…we'll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you.

The smile of a deceiver is flawed, insufficient. But can we see these muscles resting there inert when there's so much local variation in faces, pads of fat, odd concavities, differences of bone structure? Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a deliberate liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.

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

Even a trashy movie can make you cry. There were deep emotional reactions that ducked the censure of the higher reasoning processes and forced us to enact, however vestigially, our roles - me, the indignant secret lover revealed; Clarissa the woman cruelly betrayed.

Au-delà d'un certain âge, traverser la ville donne désagréablement à penser. Les adresses des morts s'accumulent.

The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.

In the minds of the principals, the history of the marriage was redrafted to have been always doomed, love was recast as delusion.

There was something fascinating about tall thin men, the way their bones and Adam's apple lurked so unconcealed beneath the skin, their birdlike faces, their predatory stoop.

Self-aware existence. I'm lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it's for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.

We're alone then, all of us, even me, each treading a deserted highway, toting in a bundle on a shouldered stick the schemes, the flow charts, for unconscious advancement.

At moments like this, his misanthropy sensitized him to the people packed tight around him, no longer fellow travelers but adversaries, competitors in a slow race. And he could not help himself: he was on the lookout for one of those cheats who edge up on the periphery of vision, moving while pretending not to, cutting in with a sly shuffle, a subtle turn of the shoulder. Burdening others by stealing time.

He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them as real as a haunting. --Solar