Quotes from Ian Mcewan

And so the dead might cease to grieve And we might make amends And there might be a pact between Dead friends and living friends.

Ragged curls of unfurling ampersands swam across her vision.

He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.

It was a cliché of romantic love, but no less painful for that: the stronger my feelings, the more remote and unattainable Miranda appeared.

My advice to newborns: don't cry, look around, taste the air.

Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighbourhood to fix a sash window, though a few had tried.

For speechless helpless humans, much power lay in a violent switch of extreme emotions. A crude mode of tyranny. Real-world tyrants were often compared to infants.

By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.

What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.

When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work.

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

Either I've always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don't know what it means.

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.

My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me.

It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.

I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'

I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.