Quotes from Ian Mcewan

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy, for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.

Get in first and shape the terms.

Soon human meaning would be bleached from the rocks, the landscape would assume its beauty and draw him in; the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be set free.

beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, has infinite variation.

They would also need to talk sense to her. The almost-existing children, the husky-voiced daughter, a museum curator perhaps, and the gifted, less settled son, good at too many things, who failed to complete his university course, but a far better pianist than she. Both always affectionate, brilliant at Christmases and summer-holiday castles and entertaining their youngest relations.

The journal preserved her dignity; she might look and behave like and live the life of a trained nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew - family, home, friends - writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done.

Some people go nowhere, even into disputes, without a soundtrack.

But the crowded recent past can be difficult to recall.

Que los filósofos de la ciencia se engañen creyendo lo contrario, pero la física estaba exenta de contaminación humana, describía un mundo que existiría igual si no existieran los hombres y las mujeres y todas sus tristezas.

She was not in pain, not yet, but she was retreating before its threat.

If I can't get along with the father of my children, how can the world make progress?

It bore her no malice, this animal, it was indifferent to her misery. It would move as a cage panther might: because it is awake, out of boredom, for the sake of movement itself, or for no reason at all, and with no awareness.

She resented the way she was listening out for him, her attention poised, holding its breath, for the creak of the door or a floorboard. Wanting it, dreading it.

And there was something I've since noticed over the years—the mountain range that separates the naked from the clothed man. Two men on one passport.

Los relatos no se venden. Los editores suelen hacer estas colecciones como un favor a sus autores consagrados.

Turning points are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character's growth.

Ci si misura rapportandosi agli altri, non esiste alternativa. Di quando in quando, in modo assolutamente involontario, arriva qualcuno e ti insegna qualcosa sul tuo conto.

self-interest and kindness were best not separated

He leaves behind in the library a field of resonating sadness, an imagined shape, a disappointed hologram still in possession of his chair.

Your reputation will rest only on this, because ultimately reality is social, it's among others that we have to live and their judgments matter.

In those first moments it was easier to conceal a confusion of feeling behind a motherly tone

devised; then came the problems of success itself, unbelievable sales, new production quotas

Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces.

Beyond all their hopes for a sane, just world free of war and class oppression, they feel that belonging to the Party associates them with all that is youthful, lively, intelligent and daring.