Quotes from Ian Mcewan

The years slid over old deaths like a heavy lid. Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget. Should have kept a journal.

To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy.

The sound of crickets, the feel of warm dried grass on the soles of his feet and the scent of baked earth pleased him. The big thick glass was icy in his hands. When he set it down, the tinkle of the ice cubes sounded personal.

He tilted back his chair and surveyed his desk as one might a life.

And these are only the ones I happen to know about. As soon as you discover you're not the best, you throw it in and hate yourself. Same with relationships. You want too much and move on.

Reflecting on the night before, he found it extraordinary that after a lifetime of infidelities, a night with an imaginary friend was no less exciting.

She would never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied. She never was. She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction, and was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her own way back. She was not endowed with, or old enough to possess, such independence or spirit. An imposing congregation had massed itself around her first certainties, and now it was waiting and she could not disappoint it at the altar.

Such a fantasy of miscegenation could be a form of racism or simple adoration, but either way he was in no mood to banish it.

There is a compassion in rational thought that is sometimes missing in religious conviction.

We couldn't free ourselves into the present. Instead we wanted to think about setting other people free. We wanted to think about their unhappiness. We used their wretchedness to mask our own. And our wretchedness was our inability to take the simple good things life was offering us and be glad to have them.

People sometimes forget how to be happy due to a failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal footing. That was the only moral a story must have.

Here was a surprise, a love affair, an affair of love, as he entered his seventies.

Daylight delights you.

There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not travelled so far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I've made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in my last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away.

Love just follows you.

and Fred Tackett. Suddenly a figure appeared before them. They had a moment to take him in. Early twenties, bright pink face, stringy, short leather jacket. Perhaps he wanted money.

The self-made hell was an interesting construct. Nobody escaped making one, at least one, in a lifetime. Some lives were nothing but. It was a tautology that self-inflicted misery was an extension of character.

Science fiction writers and thriller writers and traditional so-called 'literary' novelists are all novelists, and they finally have to be judged on how good they are, not on which category they belong in.

In that time, moral standards were high in public life and so, therefore, was hypocrisy.

He married a woman to stop her getting away/Now she's there all day

Los comentaristas que sugerían que la victoria del ordenador acabaría con el go se equivocaban. Tras su quinta derrota, el viejo maestro de go, auxiliado por un asistente, se puso de pie despacio, hizo una reverencia de cabeza hacia el ordenador portátil y lo felicitó con voz temblorosa. Dijo: El jinete en su montura no acabó con el atletismo. Corremos por placer.

Caen las hojas. Llega la primavera, y tu caída.

Ah, mirosul am?rui al pielii unei alte persoane, acest veÅŸmânt menit s? ascund? miezul de fecale.

But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past—how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory.