Quotes by Ian McEwan

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air

But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed she would open her legs to me

Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world.

...children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.

Ive never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasnt impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two.

Its a matter of dishonour, and when it gets out, which its bound to, this will be the one act youll be remembered for. Everything else you achieved will be irrelevant. Your reputation will rest only on this, because ultimately reality is social, its among others that we have to live and their judgements matter. - Pg. 198

Im sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.

I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...its in the stars!

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.

…the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.

You can tell a lot from a persons nails. When a life starts to unravel, theyre among the first to go.

Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word.

He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.

Theres pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. Its already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When shes no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she wont remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandals thong between her toes, the summers warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.

Memorys got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.

I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.

He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.

Perhaps Id been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you dont have to comply with a request just because its reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.