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Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Nothing
Every
Unintentionally
Something
Measure
Really
Finally
People
Taught
Quite
Else
Someone

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
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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.
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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.
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The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
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The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
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It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
Ian Mcewan
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He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
Ian Mcewan
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I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'
Ian Mcewan
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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.
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But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.
Ian Mcewan
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Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
Ian Mcewan
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It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.
Ian Mcewan
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I'm quite good at not writing.
Ian Mcewan
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Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
Ian Mcewan
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He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.
Ian Mcewan
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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
Ian Mcewan