Quote

I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.

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
Information
Possible
Moment
Moments
Delaying
Stills
Lingering
Still
Prior
Back
Outcomes
Time
Holding

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

Image
Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
Ian Mcewan
Image
All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
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
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
Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
Ian Mcewan
Image
It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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
Image
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I'm quite good at not writing.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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
Image
You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
Ian Mcewan
Image
He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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
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