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And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Sigh
Cheerful
Clever
Feeling
Feelings
Away
Thought
Always

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
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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.
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No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.
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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.
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I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
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The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
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Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
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He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
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Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.
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It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
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Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.
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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
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The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
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Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves.
Ian Mcewan