Quote

When anything can happen, everything matters.

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
Happen
Happens
Anything
Everything
Matter
Matters

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

Image
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
Ian Mcewan
Image
We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.
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
It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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
Image
It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
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 had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?
Ian Mcewan
Image
Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.
Ian Mcewan
Image
But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill.
Ian Mcewan
Image
The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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
Image
Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
Ian Mcewan
Image
Someone once asked me If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you? And I said No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this.
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
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
The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
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