Ian Mcewan

“Politics is the enemy of the imagination.”

“True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.”

“I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.”

“He had once felt light on the ground. He used to think his life was an open-ended adventure, he used to give things away, it amused him when the unexpected happened, benevolent coincidences used to bear him along. When had all that stopped?”

“You want a picture of futility? It's a tunnel in the desert, from nowhere to nowhere, four hundred and fifty feet long.”

“Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your unconscious choice of mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.”

“We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.”

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.”

“Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.”

“How can one understand the inner life of a character, real or fictional, without knowing the state of her finances?”

“When a court determines any question with respect to ... the upbringing of a child ... the child's welfare shall be the court's paramount consideration. ~ Section 1(1) Children Act 1989”

“Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.”

“We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth”

“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.”

“When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.”

“What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?”

“True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.”

“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.”

“He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.”

“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?”

“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.”