Ian Mcewan
Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.Collection: School
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.Collection: Shoes
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.Collection: World
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.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Talking
I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.Collection: Kindness
come back, come back to meCollection: Come Back To Me
London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who had started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.Collection: Cities
What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?Collection: Rainy Day
Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.Collection: Littles
In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: 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. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled.Collection: Reading
It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.Collection: Views
There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. 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. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.Collection: Real
Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Leaving
By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the StateCollection: Individuality
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.Collection: His Love
However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.Collection: Looks
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.Collection: Football
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.Collection: Thinking
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?Collection: Novelists
But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.Collection: Simple
And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?Collection: Somewhere Else
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.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Hurt
You can tell a lot from a person’s nails. When a life starts to unravel, they’re among the first to go.Collection: Firsts
A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.Collection: Stories
Dearest Cecilia, the story can resume. The one I had been planning on that evening walk. I can become again the man who once crossed the surrey park at dusk, in my best suit, swaggering on the promise of life. The man who, with the clarity of passion, made love to you in the library. The story can resume. I will return. Find you, love you, marry you and live without shame.Collection: Romance
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment’s thought, and that would take time.Collection: Romance
I’ve yet to meet somebody who said, ‘Your stories are so revolting I couldn’t read them.’Collection: Stories