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.Collection: Compassion
No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.Collection: Borrowed
The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.Collection: Curiosity
When anything can happen, everything matters.Collection: Matter
...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.Collection: Falling In Love
There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.Collection: Art
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.Collection: Doing Nothing
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.Collection: Girl
A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.Collection: People
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.Collection: Desert
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.Collection: Self
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."Collection: Thinking
Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.Collection: Character
one could drown in irrelevance.Collection: Irrelevance
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.Collection: Love
He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.Collection: Next
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?Collection: Children
We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.Collection: Lying
You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.Collection: Depression
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Teacher
Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.Collection: Self
She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: War
I find it very difficult to talk about unwritten works. It's never useful to start putting words casually around the flimsiest of notions. I finished Saturday only in late November and I'm now in the rather pleasant stage of traveling, reading and waiting.Collection: Reading
I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.Collection: Sorry
I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.Collection: Passion
My biggest fear, I think falling from a great height. If I want to keep myself awake at night I imagine I'm on the top of the North or South Tower in 9/11, wondering whether I'm going to be burnt to death or I'm going to jump. And I think I would burn to death. And yet I'm impressed by the fact that hundreds didn't.Collection: Fall
I'm not against religion in the sense that I feel I can't tolerate it, but I think written into the rubric of religion is the certainty of its own truth. And since there are 6,000 religions currently on the face of the earth, they can't all be right. And only the secular spirit can guarantee those freedoms and it's the secular spirit that they contest.Collection: Thinking
None of us really either know the circumstances of our death or are likely to exert as much control over it as we would like to, but we can certainly have a little more say in it if we are terminally ill than we have at the moment. That's the element of dignity, but sure, life is very hard to organise even when you are fit and healthy.Collection: Healthy
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.Collection: Writing
Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.Collection: Sadness
When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Writing
i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.Collection: Mad
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.Collection: Nuts
Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Littles
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.Collection: Taught
He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.Collection: Views
What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?Collection: Men
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.Collection: War
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.Collection: Men
I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.Collection: Farewell
And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.Collection: Clever
Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.Collection: Common Sense
When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. 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. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Lying
My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end.Collection: Believe