Quotes About Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

I read everything by Ian McEwan, he is so elegant. I love reading anything about Shakespeare, too. He is my first love. If I had a time machine, I would be hanging out with him.

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.

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.

I am uncertain whether our civilization at this turn of the millennium is cursed by too much or too little belief, whether people like Bernard and June cause the trouble, or people like me.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

So June´s idea was that if one dog was a personal depression, two dogs were a kind of cultural depression, civilisation´s worst moods.

And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran.

Lucy had told me more than once that the past was a burden, that it was time to tear everything down.

But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were three gins and a bottle of wine

From where I am, you and my mother and the world are all one. Hyperbole, I know. The world is also full of wonders, which is why I'm foolishly in love with it. And I love and admire you both. What I'm saying is, I'm fearful of rejection.

Mace leaned on his shovel and did a passable imitation. 'I think we'd rather not.' Very good, guv'nor. I'll remember that next time. Divigation was nice. Where'd you get that one? He swallowed a ****ing dictionary, Corporal Nettle said proudly.

Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel. When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping an aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme.

The new, wellspring of all bad dreams. Driven by a self-harming compulsion, I listen closely to analysis and dissent.

The world is also full of wonders, which is why I'm foolishly in love with it.

We're bound by the same rules that dog out pets. The great chain of non-being is round our necks too.

It wasn't hatred that killed the innocents but faith, that famished ghost, still revered, even in the mildest quarters.

It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.

Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent—how the tilt of a skull could change a life!—Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony's manuscript from

Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent—how the tilt of a skull could change a life!—Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony's manuscript from the

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

approached as millions before me had approached a famous presence in a public place, with outward humility masking the entitlement that genuine admiration confers.