Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
Ian Mcewan
Image
It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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
Image
Not being boring is quite a challenge.
Ian Mcewan
Image
i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'
Ian Mcewan
Image
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
Ian Mcewan
Image
She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
Ian Mcewan
Image
There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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
Image
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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
Image
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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.
Ian Mcewan