Quotes from Ian Mcewan

So June´s idea was that if one dog was a personal depression, two dogs were a kind of cultural depression, civilisation´s worst moods.

The light of artistic creation is also blinding. The artist can't see the suffering he causes to those around him. And the'll never understand the purity of his goal, how the heat of his invention won't melt the ice in his heart. He must be ruthless! No religion, no purpose except this: Make something perfect before you die. Life is short, art is for all time

But on this particular morning, weary of books and birdsong and country peace, Edward took his rickety childhood bike from the shed, raised the saddle, pumped up the tired and set off with no particular plan. He had a pound note and two half crowns in his pocket and all he wanted was forward movement.

This, as they used to say, was the side on which her bread was buttered.

My darling one, you are young and lovely, But inexperienced, and though you think The world is at your feet, It can rise up and tread on you.

He was supposed to be reading, but all he could do was watch her and love her bare arms, her Alice band, her straight back, the sweet tilt of her chin as she tucked the instrument under it...

In fact, as I get older, I begin to feel that actually what we need more in the world is doubt; more skepticism, less crazed certainty. . . . People who know the answer and are going to impose it on everybody else, I think, are terrifying people.

Past a certain age, men froze into place; they tended to believe that, even in adversity, they were somehow at one with their fates. They were who they thought they were.

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air. As his mother used to say, another element; the day is changed, Henry, when you take a swim. And that day is bound to be marked out from all the rest.

And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran.

I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.

She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.

Everyone believed that to be caught out in a shameful moment when neck muscles relax and the head snaps forward might damage career prospects. But believing was not quite enough. Heavy eyelids in the late afternoon had their own logic, their own peculiar weight.

But here's life's most limiting truth - it's always now, always here, never then and there.

Join MI5? I was ready to lead it.

Lucy had told me more than once that the past was a burden, that it was time to tear everything down.

Words, as I'm beginning to appreciate, can make things true.

He did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years had wrought, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and artless smile.

Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not.

What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cognition-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set. The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.

And they became cool, even though they were both rather short. -p. 205

And behind all this human movement the ocean bobbed and folded and slid, for nothing could keep still, not people, not water, not time.

A blend of desolation and outrage. Or longing and fury. She wanted him back, she never wanted to see him again.

But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it's tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes.