110+ Ian McEwan Quotes On Education, Society And World

Ian McEwan is a British author who has written several novels and short stories. He is best known for his critically acclaimed novel Atonement, which was adapted into an Academy Award winning film. He has also written novels such as Enduring Love, Saturday, Amsterdam, and On Chesil Beach. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ian McEwan on education, life, society.

Top 10 Ian McEwan Quotes

1. come back, come back to me
2. ...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.
3. 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.
4. A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
5. When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
6. I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).
7. What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.
8. 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.
9. Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.
• When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion.
• One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.
• Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.
• He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
• When anything can happen, everything matters.
• was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?
• Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.
• Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.
• Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.

Ian McEwan Quotes About Life

I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist. — Ian McEwan

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness. — Ian McEwan

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

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

Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory? — Ian McEwan

In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot. — Ian McEwan

Someone once asked me "If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?" And I said "No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this." — Ian McEwan

The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it. — Ian McEwan

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

It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection. — Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes About Love

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

Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame. — Ian McEwan

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

...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen. — Ian McEwan

How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten. — Ian McEwan

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational. — Ian McEwan

But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper. — Ian McEwan

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

She loved him, though not at this particular moment. — Ian McEwan

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

Ian McEwan Quotes About World

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

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form. — Ian McEwan

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

And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you. — Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes About Atonement

From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended. — Ian McEwan

The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back. — Ian McEwan

It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now. — Ian McEwan

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? — Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes About Writing

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan. — Ian McEwan

I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time. — Ian McEwan

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

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

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

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

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

Ian McEwan Quotes About Imagination

Politics is the enemy of the imagination. — Ian McEwan

I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination. — Ian McEwan

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 it is the beginning of morality. — Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes About Novelist

It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important. — Ian McEwan

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State — Ian McEwan

Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach. — Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas. — Ian McEwan

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

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

And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage. — Ian McEwan

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

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

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

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

Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed. — Ian McEwan

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

By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage. — Ian McEwan

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

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind. — Ian McEwan

It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush? — Ian McEwan

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading. — Ian McEwan

She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance. — Ian McEwan

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're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto - think small. — Ian McEwan

It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual. — Ian McEwan

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

Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think. — Ian McEwan

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time. — Ian McEwan

In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death. — Ian McEwan

But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. — Ian McEwan

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

Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret. — Ian McEwan

Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself. — Ian McEwan

But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill. — Ian McEwan

Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract. — Ian McEwan

He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse. — Ian McEwan

Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense. — Ian McEwan

This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer - a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight. — Ian McEwan

It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning. — Ian McEwan

All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view. — Ian McEwan

Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious? — Ian McEwan

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust. — Ian McEwan

I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes. — Ian McEwan

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence. — Ian McEwan

He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god. — Ian McEwan

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience. — Ian McEwan

Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone. — Ian McEwan

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation. — Ian McEwan

The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis. — Ian McEwan

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

I think the Americans are dying to leave Iraq. I was against the war but longed for the fall of Saddam; the decision to go to war clearly was taken long before the matter reached the U.N., given its inevitability. I kept my fingers crossed for the emergence of democracy in Iraq even if that would mean victory for a man whose politics I have little sympathy with. — Ian McEwan

She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore. — Ian McEwan

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people. — Ian McEwan

It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity. — Ian McEwan

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed. — Ian McEwan

It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us. — Ian McEwan

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad. — Ian McEwan

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing. — Ian McEwan

What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects? — Ian McEwan

I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate. — Ian McEwan

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are? — Ian McEwan

Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes. — Ian McEwan

Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die? — Ian McEwan

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

Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence — Ian McEwan

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

Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning. — Ian McEwan

Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes. — Ian McEwan

I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word. — Ian McEwan

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

Life Lessons by Ian McEwan

1. Ian McEwan teaches us the importance of resilience in the face of adversity. He encourages us to be brave and take risks, even when the outcome is uncertain. He also reminds us to be mindful of the consequences of our actions and to strive for a better future.
2. Ian McEwan emphasizes the importance of understanding and empathy in relationships. He encourages us to be open-minded and to accept others for who they are, even if we don't agree with them.
3. Ian McEwan encourages us to be honest and authentic in our lives. He reminds us to be true to ourselves and to strive for integrity in all aspects of our lives.