Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

53. “Dearest Cecilia, the story can resume. The one I had been planning on that evening walk. I can become again the man who once crossed the surrey park at dusk, in my best suit, swaggering on the promise of life. The man who, with the clarity of passion, made love to you in the library. The story can resume. I will return. Find you, love you, marry you and live without shame.”

— Ian McEwan

54. “Loud people, especially loud women, always attract enemies.”

— Ian McEwan

55. “Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

57. “Chi prende in mano un violino, o qualunque altro strumento, compie un gesto di speranza che comporta il desiderio di un futuro.”

— Ian McEwan

58. “It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.”

— Ian McEwan

59. “There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

61. “Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.”

— Ian McEwan

62. “He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.”

— Ian McEwan

63. “Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?”

— Ian McEwan

64. “He saw that no one owned anything really. It’s all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we’ll desert them in the end.”

— Ian McEwan

65. “Not being boring is quite a challenge.”

— Ian McEwan

66. “Politics is the enemy of the imagination.”

— Ian McEwan

67. “Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.”

— Ian McEwan

68. “The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

70. “When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in-you know, a girl I’ve just met, or this song we’regoing to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto – think small.”

— Ian McEwan

71. “One has to have the courage of one’s pessimism.”

— Ian McEwan

72. “When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.”

— Ian McEwan

73. “Surely the Greeks had a word for it, choosing to act in one’s own very worst interests? Yes, they did. It was akrasia.”

— Ian McEwan

74. “Now, I’m an atheist. I really don’t believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.”

— Ian McEwan

75. “Unless, unless, unless – a wisp of a word, ghostly token of altered fate, bleating little iamb of hope, it drifts across my thoughts like a floater in the vitreous humour of an eye. Mere hope.”

— Ian McEwan

76. “I don’t really believe in evil at all.”

— Ian McEwan

77. “In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.”

— Ian McEwan

78. “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said.”

— Ian McEwan

79. “When people ask, “Is there any advice you’d give a young writer?,” I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.”

— Ian McEwan

80. “When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.”

— Ian McEwan

81. “I write from life. But the reader, you know, imports the symbols, the associations. I can’t keep them out. That’s how poetry works.”

— Ian McEwan

82. “Arguing with the person you love is its own peculiar torment. The self divides against itself. Love slugs it out with its Freudian opposite. And if death wins and love dies, who gives a damn? You do, which enrages you and makes you more reckless yet. There’s intrinsic exhaustion too. Both know, or think they know, that a reconciliation must happen, though it could take days, even weeks.”

— Ian McEwan

83. “How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

85. “I’ve always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.”

— Ian McEwan

86. “It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get.”

— Ian McEwan

87. “Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

89. “God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.”

— Ian McEwan

90. “How can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also god?”

— Ian McEwan

91. “To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.”

— Ian McEwan

92. “These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing – it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

94. “A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.”

— Ian McEwan

95. “Initially, a simple phrase chased round and round in Cecilia’s thoughts: Of course, of course. How had she not seen it? Everything was explained. The whole day, the weeks before, her childhood. A lifetime. It was clear to her now. Why else take so long to choose a dress, or fight over a vase, or find everything so different, or be unable to leave? What had made her so blind, so obtuse?”

— Ian McEwan

96. “The infinite variety of the human condition precludes arbitrary definition.”

— Ian McEwan

97. “So here I am, upside down in a woman.”

— Ian McEwan

98. “Factory settings – a contemporary synonym for fate.”

— Ian McEwan

99. “How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect? Not everything had a cause, and pretending otherwise was an interference in the workings of the world that was futile, and could even lead to grief. Some things were simply so.”

— Ian McEwan

100. “Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.”

— Ian McEwan