Ian McEwan Quotes

• Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Her eyes, nose, mouth, skin, all might have been designed in committee to meet the barest requirements of feasibility.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Inspiration

• We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Truth

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Romance

• 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

  Topics in Life

• Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing

• 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

  Topics in Justice

  Tags in People, Faith, Severe

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Successful, Important, Benefit

• One has to have the courage of one’s pessimism.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Courage, Pessimism

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Interesting, Accept, Intention

• Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Politics

  Tags in Imagination

• One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret – how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that’s even possible, interested me.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Correct, Religious, Possible, Important

• A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writer, Something

• As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn’t as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Example, Culture

•  At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Risk

  Tags in Live

• Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Problem, Religious

•  How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Better, Quietly, Length, Thinks

• I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

  Ian McEwan

  Topics in Funny

  Tags in Actually, Find, Novels

Ian McEwan (60)

Birth:	21st June, 1948
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist, Screenwriter

About

Ian Russell McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, England. He is an English novelist and screenwriter. He earned his degree in English literature from the University of Sussex in 1970. He earned his master's degree in literature from the University of East Anglia in 1971. He has written several novels include: The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Amsterdam(Won- Man Booker Prize for Fiction), Atonement, Saturday, On Chesil Beach, Solar, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act, and Nutshell. His Short story collections including First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets. He has written two TV plays include: Jack Flea's Birthday Celebration and The Imitation Game. He has written several films include: The Ploughman's Lunch, Soursweet, The Good Son, On Chesil Beach, and The Children Act. In 2011, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.

Related Authors

• Jean Genet
• Patrick Jones
• Michael Cunningham
• Marguerite Young
• Ann Beattie
• J. G. Ballard
• Yann Martel
• Peter Farrelly
• Llewelyn Powys
• John Oxenham

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 20th March

Births

• 1950 - William Hurt
• 1972 - Alex Kapranos
• 1882 - Rene Coty
• 1945 - Tim Yeo
• 1940 - Mary Ellen Mark

Deaths

• 1844 - Peter Buell Porter
• 1993 - Polykarp Kusch
• 2010 - Liz Carpenter
• 2010 - Stewart Udall
• 1945 - Lord Alfred Douglas