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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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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Someone
Physical
Gloomy
Made
Pure
Providence
Every
Instead
Instant
Never
Possible
Believed
Like
Law
Seemed
Chance
Sky
Scheming
Freedom
Laws
Futures
Future
Fate
Trillion

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed.
Ian Mcewan
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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
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The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
Ian Mcewan
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There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
Ian Mcewan
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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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It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning.
Ian Mcewan
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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
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The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
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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At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
Ian Mcewan
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It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
Ian Mcewan
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I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
Ian Mcewan
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I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.
Ian Mcewan
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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
Ian Mcewan
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
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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Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
Ian Mcewan
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It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
Ian Mcewan
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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
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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