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Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2026 Update)
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Ian McEwan Quote: “She listed some relevant ingredients, goals towards which a child might grow. Economic and moral freedom, virtue, compassion and altruism, satisfying work through engagement with demanding tasks, a flourishing network of personal relationships, earning the esteem of others, pursuing larger meanings to one’s existence, and having at the centre of one’s life one or a small number of significant relations defined above all by love.”

401. “She listed some relevant ingredients, goals towards which a child might grow. Economic and moral freedom, virtue, compassion and altruism, satisfying work through engagement with demanding tasks, a flourishing network of personal relationships, earning the esteem of others, pursuing larger meanings to one’s existence, and having at the centre of one’s life one or a small number of significant relations defined above all by love.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces.”

402. “Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “It was still a novel and vertiginous experience for them to look for a minute on end into the eyes of another adult, without embarrassment or restraint.”

403. “It was still a novel and vertiginous experience for them to look for a minute on end into the eyes of another adult, without embarrassment or restraint.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite. If he could believe in such all-too-human gods they would be the ones to fear. 4 In the third week after Alissa’s disappearance Roland set about imposing order on the overstuffed bookshelves around the table just off the kitchen.”

404. “The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite. If he could believe in such all-too-human gods they would be the ones to fear. 4 In the third week after Alissa’s disappearance Roland set about imposing order on the overstuffed bookshelves around the table just off the kitchen.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it.”

405. “The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it.”

406. “It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “He no longer cared much what others thought of him. There were few benefits in growing older, and this was one.”

407. “He no longer cared much what others thought of him. There were few benefits in growing older, and this was one.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “As in Northern Ireland, children, shoppers, ordinary working men were all suitable targets. Bombs in department stores and pubs would have even more impact in the context of the widely anticipated social breakdown brought on by industrial decline, high unemployment, rising inflation and an energy crisis.”

408. “As in Northern Ireland, children, shoppers, ordinary working men were all suitable targets. Bombs in department stores and pubs would have even more impact in the context of the widely anticipated social breakdown brought on by industrial decline, high unemployment, rising inflation and an energy crisis.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “He speaks in a quiet, breathy tone, exaggeratedly slow. Where do we learn such tricks? Are they inscribed, along with the rest of our emotional repertoire? Or do we get them from the movies? He says, “Look, there’s this problem out there” – he gestures to the window – “and all I wanted from you was your support and help.”

409. “He speaks in a quiet, breathy tone, exaggeratedly slow. Where do we learn such tricks? Are they inscribed, along with the rest of our emotional repertoire? Or do we get them from the movies? He says, “Look, there’s this problem out there” – he gestures to the window – “and all I wanted from you was your support and help.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves.”

410. “He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “They had never discussed feelings, and had no language for them now.”

411. “They had never discussed feelings, and had no language for them now.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “No one exclaims at the moment of one’s dazzling coming-out, It’s a person! Instead: It’s a girl, It’s a boy. Pink or blue. 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? I seethed, and then, like everyone else, I settled down and made the best of my inheritance. For sure, complexity would come upon me in time.”

412. “No one exclaims at the moment of one’s dazzling coming-out, It’s a person! Instead: It’s a girl, It’s a boy. Pink or blue. 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? I seethed, and then, like everyone else, I settled down and made the best of my inheritance. For sure, complexity would come upon me in time.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “In fact, everyone he’s passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.”

413. “In fact, everyone he’s passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Turning points are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character’s growth.”

414. “Turning points are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character’s growth.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.”

415. “His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.”

416. “Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “No one can predict which of life’s vexations insomnia will favour.”

417. “No one can predict which of life’s vexations insomnia will favour.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “But Clive stared at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. Other thoughts diverted him occasionally, and for periods he read, but this was the theme of his northward journey, the long and studied redefinition of a friendship.”

418. “But Clive stared at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. Other thoughts diverted him occasionally, and for periods he read, but this was the theme of his northward journey, the long and studied redefinition of a friendship.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “This sense of absence had been growing... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity... He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.”

419. “This sense of absence had been growing... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity... He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel.”

420. “These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense.”

421. “The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “To be elsewhere! It was not true that travel was a false god and that you took your troubles with you and nothing could change. There was the unimaginable and unforeseen thrill of being away, of renewal, and remembering that the world was huge and various, and you and your concerns were small.”

422. “To be elsewhere! It was not true that travel was a false god and that you took your troubles with you and nothing could change. There was the unimaginable and unforeseen thrill of being away, of renewal, and remembering that the world was huge and various, and you and your concerns were small.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “The possibility that Julie and I were responsible for the disintegration filled me with horror and delight.”

423. “The possibility that Julie and I were responsible for the disintegration filled me with horror and delight.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “From beneath her, amplified by the stone arch, came the hiss of the breeze disturbing the sedge, and a sudden beating of wings against water which subsided abruptly. 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.”

424. “From beneath her, amplified by the stone arch, came the hiss of the breeze disturbing the sedge, and a sudden beating of wings against water which subsided abruptly. 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 Quote: “Books are difficult to tidy. Hard to chuck out. They resist.”

425. “Books are difficult to tidy. Hard to chuck out. They resist.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “He had never learned anything new at a meeting.”

426. “He had never learned anything new at a meeting.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Such a fantasy of miscegenation could be a form of racism or simple adoration, but either way he was in no mood to banish it.”

427. “Such a fantasy of miscegenation could be a form of racism or simple adoration, but either way he was in no mood to banish it.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “The term “teenager” had not long been invented, and it never occured to him that the separateness he felt, which was both painful and delicious, could be shared by anyone else.”

428. “The term “teenager” had not long been invented, and it never occured to him that the separateness he felt, which was both painful and delicious, could be shared by anyone else.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “The reason he wouldn’t be drawn into political or even theological debate was that he was indifferent to other people’s opinions and felt no urge to engage with or oppose them.”

429. “The reason he wouldn’t be drawn into political or even theological debate was that he was indifferent to other people’s opinions and felt no urge to engage with or oppose them.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die.”

430. “He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy.”

431. “To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “The journal preserved her dignity; she might look and behave like and live the life of a trained nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew – family, home, friends – writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done.”

432. “The journal preserved her dignity; she might look and behave like and live the life of a trained nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew – family, home, friends – writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom door.”

433. “Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom door.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Poles whom I instinctively admired urged me to support the very Western politicians I most distrusted, and a language of anti-communism – which until then I had associated with cranky ideologues of the right – came easily to everyone here where Communism was a network of privileges and corruption and licensed violence, a mental disease, an array of laughable, improbable lies and, most tangibly, the instrument of occupation by a foreign power.”

434. “Poles whom I instinctively admired urged me to support the very Western politicians I most distrusted, and a language of anti-communism – which until then I had associated with cranky ideologues of the right – came easily to everyone here where Communism was a network of privileges and corruption and licensed violence, a mental disease, an array of laughable, improbable lies and, most tangibly, the instrument of occupation by a foreign power.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “The phrase was “in two places at once,” and the memory was of early morning.”

435. “The phrase was “in two places at once,” and the memory was of early morning.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “In her uncomfortable position, his mother cocked her head on one side as she prepared to listen. It was a habit Stephen himself had adopted. He could see their faces, the lined expressions of tenderness and anxiety. It was the aging, the essential selves enduring while the bodies withered away. He felt the urgency of contracting time, of unfinished business. There were conversations he had not yet had with them and for which he had always thought there would be time.”

436. “In her uncomfortable position, his mother cocked her head on one side as she prepared to listen. It was a habit Stephen himself had adopted. He could see their faces, the lined expressions of tenderness and anxiety. It was the aging, the essential selves enduring while the bodies withered away. He felt the urgency of contracting time, of unfinished business. There were conversations he had not yet had with them and for which he had always thought there would be time.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “It wasn’t hatred that killed the innocents but faith, that famished ghost, still revered, even in the mildest quarters.”

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

Ian McEwan Quote: “Now human blubber draped his efforts.”

438. “Now human blubber draped his efforts.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future.”

439. “My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “How would that constitute an ending? What service or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of the life I have remaining. I no longer possess the lavage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshall’s are dead, we will exist as my inventions.”

440. “How would that constitute an ending? What service or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of the life I have remaining. I no longer possess the lavage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshall’s are dead, we will exist as my inventions.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget.”

441. “Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.”

442. “It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Surely, there was grandeur in experiment.”

443. “Surely, there was grandeur in experiment.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “To kill the brain is to kill the will to kill the brain.”

444. “To kill the brain is to kill the will to kill the brain.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Instead, dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention, his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque.”

445. “Instead, dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention, his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “But the crowded recent past can be difficult to recall.”

446. “But the crowded recent past can be difficult to recall.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.”

447. “Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “The brain’s fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?”

448. “The brain’s fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?”

Ian McEwan Quote: “He suspected he had brushed against a fundamental law of the universe: such ecstasy must compromise his freedom. That was its price.”

449. “He suspected he had brushed against a fundamental law of the universe: such ecstasy must compromise his freedom. That was its price.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “This was how to steer a life successfully, Roland thought. Make a choice, act! That’s the lesson. A shame not to have known the trick long ago. Good decisions came less through rational calculation, more from sudden good moods. But so too did some of his worst decisions. But that was not for now.”

450. “This was how to steer a life successfully, Roland thought. Make a choice, act! That’s the lesson. A shame not to have known the trick long ago. Good decisions came less through rational calculation, more from sudden good moods. But so too did some of his worst decisions. But that was not for now.”

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