Quotes from Ian Mcewan

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

But this inglorious revolution wasn't for me. I didn't want a sex shop in every town.

My pleasure in reading is not necessarily the witnessing of something new, but of something familiar which I haven't seen described.

In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition.

How can one understand the inner life of a character, real or fictional, without knowing the state of her finances?

God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

J'aurais dû traverser l'existence avec ce privilège que donne la beauté, de pouvoir prendre les hommes et les jeter. Au lieu de quoi c'étaient eux qui m'abandonnaient ou mouraient. Ou bien se mariaient.

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?

At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.

Now I must listen again to Claude's set piece on menu terms, as if he's the first ever to spot these unimportant absurdities. He lingers on "pan-fried." What is pan but a deceitful benediction on the vulgar and unhealthy fried?

It's a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get.

A man newly in love knows what life is.

Podía hablar de los bosques en invierno, y del siniestro muro de un castillo. ¿Pero cómo hablar de sentimientos?

I'm close to my mother's heart and know its rhythms and sudden turns. And now! It accelerates at her husband's voice, and there's an added sound, a disturbance in the chambers, like the distant rattling of maracas, or gravel shuffled softly in a tin. From down here I'd say it's a semilunar valve whose cusps are snapping to hard and sticking. Or it could be her teeth.

She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations.

It was still a novel and vertiginous experience for them to look for a minute on end into the eyes of another adult, without embarrassment or restraint.

Anyone watching me might have thought I was consulting a reference book, I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for something, a version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favorite shoes... For it was my best self I wanted ...

La folla è una creatura lenta e un po' idiota, di gran lunga meno intelligente degli individui che la compongono.

Muslim-majority countries plagued by religious puritanism, by sexual sickness, by smothered invention.

At her elbow was a slim pile of creamy white paper beside which she laid down her pen. It was only then, at the sight of these clean sheets, that the last traces, the stain, of her own situation vanished completely. She no longer had a private life, she was ready to be absorbed.

Ogni persona è, tra le altre cose, un oggetto facile da rompere e difficile da riparare.

She had a knack or weakness for laughing boisterously at her own anecdotes—not, I thought, because she found herself funny, but because she thought that life needed celebrating and wanted others to join in.

How liberating to discover in the modern age that he, a city-dweller, an indoors man who lived by the keyboard and screen, could be tracked and ravaged and be an entire meal, a source of nourishment to others.

She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband? When she was weak and desolate? Where was her protective judge?