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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

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Rather
Enter
Passivity
Ends
Intention
Grip
States
Accept
Declared
Might
Reader
Readers
Writing
Accepting
Justify
Even
Ways
Controlled
Way
State
Satan
Men
Interesting
Relax

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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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.
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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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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
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Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
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Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
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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.
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I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you’ve done before.
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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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Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
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These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
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There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.
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The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
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I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.
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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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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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And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
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Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
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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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I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time.
Ian Mcewan