Quote

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.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Waiting
Sense
Remember
Event
Back
Sitting
Mind
Terrible
Would
Events
Already
Happened

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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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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The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
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When people ask, Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?, I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
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There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
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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.
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At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
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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.
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I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
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Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
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Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
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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.
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Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
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But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
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Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
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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?
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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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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
Ian Mcewan
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Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
Ian Mcewan