Quote

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
State
Hunger
Happiness
Distance
Seems
Air
States
Begin
Antiseptic
Years
General
Vaguely
Life
Taste
Reminds
Like
Streets
Teenage
Sweet
Longing

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
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The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
Ian Mcewan
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These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
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This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
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The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
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Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.
Ian Mcewan
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A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
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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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At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.
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When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.
Ian Mcewan
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
Ian Mcewan
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i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
Ian Mcewan
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No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.
Ian Mcewan
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Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
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.
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I often don't read reviews.
Ian Mcewan