Quotes from Ian Mcewan

En cet instant qui s'étiolait, il découvrit qu'il n'avait jamais éprouvé de haine envers quiconque jusqu'ici. C'était un sentiment aussi pur que l'amour, mais exempt de passion et d'une rationnalité glacée.

There are some moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performances, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself.

The lecturer took a dim view of our species, of which psychopaths are a constant fraction, a human constant. Armed struggle, just or not, attracts them.

Ils étaient au-delà du présent, en dehors du temps, sans souvenirs et sans futur. Il n'y avait plus qu'une sensation qui effaçait tout, excitante et envahissante, et le son de l'étoffe sur l'étoffe, de la peau sur l'étoffe, tandis que leurs membres se coulaient l'un par-dessus l'autre dans cette lutte sensuelle et sans relâche.

But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me – they were all aged – I worried that what showed in my face was pity.

But first he must cover the miles again, and go back north to the field where the farmer and his dog still walked behind the plough, and ask the Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths.

I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else.

she could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains.

these were good years for staying out of a job. Without asking too many impertinent questions, the State paid the rent and granted a weekly pension to artists, out-of-work actors, musicians, mystics, therapists and a network of citizens for whom smoking cannabis and talking about it was an engrossing profession, even a vocation.

And this was to be his main point—there was one overriding reason for our failure, which was the lack of coordinated intelligence. Too many agencies, too many bureaucracies defending their corners, too many points of demarcation, insufficient centralized control.

The reason he wouldn't be drawn into political or even theological debate was that he was indifferent to other people's opinions and felt no urge to engage with or oppose them.

However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Had to explain that to the young. We may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.

be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

All day long, she realized, she had been feeling strange, and seeing strangely, as though everything was already long in the past, made more vivid by posthumous ironies she could not quite grasp.

To kill the brain is to kill the will to kill the brain.

perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.

The money to buy even the cheapest of these things had been earned by Clive dreaming up sounds, by putting one note in front of another. He had imagined everything here, he had willed it all to be here, without anyone's help.

Some endeavours are doomed at their inception, not by cowardice bu by their very nature.

The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems.

How would that constitute an ending? What serve or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn't do it to them. I'm too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of the life I have remaining. I no longer possess the leverage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, we will exist as my inventions.

A travelling salesman has a hundred cities on his patch. He knows all the distances between every pair of cities. He needs to visit each city once and end up at his starting point. What's his shortest route?

See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That's what God's love does. If you're beginning to feel uncomfortable now, it's because the changes in you are already beginning to happen and one day you'll be glad to say, Deliver me from meaninglessness.

What tended to happen, to Colin and Mary at least, was that subjects were not explored so much as defensively reiterated, or forced into elaborate irrelevancies, and suffused with irritability.

All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?