Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.”

— Ian McEwan

202. “I’m close to my mother’s heart and know its rhythms and sudden turns. And now! It accelerates at her husband’s voice, and there’s an added sound, a disturbance in the chambers, like the distant rattling of maracas, or gravel shuffled softly in a tin. From down here I’d say it’s a semilunar valve whose cusps are snapping to hard and sticking. Or it could be her teeth.”

— Ian McEwan

203. “She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.”

— Ian McEwan

204. “By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State.”

— Ian McEwan

205. “I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you’ve done before.”

— Ian McEwan

206. “She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity?”

— Ian McEwan

207. “I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.”

— Ian McEwan

208. “Love wasn’t possible without a self, and nor was thinking.”

— Ian McEwan

209. “She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start – she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.”

— Ian McEwan

210. “If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.”

— Ian McEwan

211. “We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.”

— Ian McEwan

212. “Either I’ve always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don’t know what it means.”

— Ian McEwan

213. “And I was with the man I loved and we were rabbiting on about how we were going to help change the world, and we were on our way home to start our lives together. I even remember thinking to myself, I’ve never been happier than this. This is it!”

— Ian McEwan

214. “It’s in me alone that my parents forever mingle, sweetly, sourly, along separate sugar-phosphate backbones, the recipe for my essential self. I also blend John and Trudy in my daydreams – like every child of estranged parents, I long to remarry them, this base pair, and so unite my circumstances to my genome.”

— Ian McEwan

215. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

216. “Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not.”

— Ian McEwan

217. “Who you get, and how it works out- there’s so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.”

— Ian McEwan

218. “But on this particular morning, weary of books and birdsong and country peace, Edward took his rickety childhood bike from the shed, raised the saddle, pumped up the tired and set off with no particular plan. He had a pound note and two half crowns in his pocket and all he wanted was forward movement.”

— Ian McEwan

219. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

220. “In difficult moments it’s sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can’t, move on to the second best thing.”

— Ian McEwan

221. “We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage.”

— Ian McEwan

222. “We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.”

— Ian McEwan

223. “It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.”

— Ian McEwan

224. “But how to do feelings? All very well to write “She felt sad”, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.”

— Ian McEwan

225. “Unlike in Daisy’s novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don’t remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.”

— Ian McEwan

226. “The thing about Satan is that he’s amazingly sophisticated. He puts a stupid idea like satanic whatever, abuse, into people’s minds, then he lets it get disproved so everyone thinks that he doesn’t exist after all, and then he’s free to do his worst.”

— Ian McEwan

227. “Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on.”

— Ian McEwan

228. “There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.”

— Ian McEwan

229. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

230. “However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you’re inside them.”

— Ian McEwan

231. “It wasn’t torpor that kept her – she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.”

— Ian McEwan

232. “Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.”

— Ian McEwan

233. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

234. “What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?”

— Ian McEwan

235. “It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.”

— Ian McEwan

236. “Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.”

— Ian McEwan

237. “And feeling clever, I’ve always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.”

— Ian McEwan

238. “I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.”

— Ian McEwan

239. “What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?”

— Ian McEwan

240. “Don’t unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth.”

— Ian McEwan

241. “It’s beautiful here and we’re still unhappy.”

— Ian McEwan

242. “Consent has rough edges.”

— Ian McEwan

243. “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. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. Africa.”

— Ian McEwan

244. “Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour, and even the precise manner in which they became lost expressed their cumulative choices, their will.”

— Ian McEwan

245. “Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies, minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range?”

— Ian McEwan

246. “Muslim majority countries plagued by religious puritanism, by sexual sickness, by smothered invention.”

— Ian McEwan

247. “We’re alone then, all of us, even me, each treading a deserted highway, toting in a bundle on a shouldered stick the schemes, the flow charts, for unconscious advancement.”

— Ian McEwan

248. “Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do – here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping, smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared.”

— Ian McEwan

249. “The smile of a deceiver is flawed, insufficient. But can we see these muscles resting there inert when there’s so much local variation in faces, pads of fat, odd concavities, differences of bone structure? Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a deliberate liar is to persuade himself he’s sincere. And once he’s sincere, all deception vanishes.”

— Ian McEwan

250. “What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cognition-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set. The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

— Ian McEwan