Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When anything can happen, everything matters.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

3. “We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

5. “True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.”

— Ian McEwan

6. “What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.”

— Ian McEwan

7. “Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence.”

— Ian McEwan

8. “If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That’s what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

10. “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?”

— Ian McEwan

11. “All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.”

— Ian McEwan

12. “And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.”

— Ian McEwan

13. “She lay in the dark and knew everything.”

— Ian McEwan

14. “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality.”

— Ian McEwan

15. “This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”

— Ian McEwan

16. “It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”

— Ian McEwan

17. “Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.”

— Ian McEwan

Featured in: Reading Quotes

18. “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. Cee.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

20. “As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

22. “Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.”

— Ian McEwan

23. “An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.”

— Ian McEwan

24. “Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.”

— Ian McEwan

25. “A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.”

— Ian McEwan

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Ian McEwan

27. “Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.”

— Ian McEwan

28. “Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

30. “Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.”

— Ian McEwan

31. “Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning...”

— Ian McEwan

32. “There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics...”

— Ian McEwan

33. “Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.”

— Ian McEwan

34. “The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

36. “Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.”

— Ian McEwan

37. “I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.”

— Ian McEwan

38. “No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.”

— Ian McEwan

39. “Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.”

— Ian McEwan

40. “What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?”

— Ian McEwan

41. “I’m quite good at not writing.”

— Ian McEwan

42. “She loved him, though not at this particular moment.”

— Ian McEwan

43. “No one knows anything, really. It’s all rented, or borrowed.”

— Ian McEwan

44. “Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.”

— Ian McEwan

45. “I don’t hold grudges.”

— Ian McEwan

46. “Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”

— Ian McEwan

47. “But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.”

— Ian McEwan

48. “Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people – there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.”

— Ian McEwan

49. “The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation – it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan