Quotes from Ian Mcewan

How quickly the dead faded into each other

It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.

The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.

Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.

The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.

The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had.

Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They're not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they'll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want.

As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.

Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?

I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!

My needs were simple. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.

No one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.

How do you feel?' Scared,' she said. 'Really scared.' But you don't look it.' I feel I'm shivering inside.

By some magic reversal, everything spectacularly useless filled the drawer intended for practical tools. What could you do with a single piece of jigsaw? But, on the other hand, did you dare throw it away?

As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you're not free to choose your desires.

What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.

Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.

Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.

I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness...Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self...God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it.

The conversation had turned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other

Narrative Tension is primarily about witholding information.