Ian Mcewan Quotes, Thoughts and images

...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.

The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.

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

I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.

You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.

Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.

He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.

What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.

Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.

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

When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.

Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken

I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.

Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.

Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?

Not being boring is quite a challenge.

When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.