Quote

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

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
Misery
Humanities
Harder
Crack
Humanity
Academy
Happiness
Professors
Cracks
Nuts
Analysis
Generally
Amenable

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

Image
In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
Ian Mcewan
Image
The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
Ian Mcewan
Image
And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
Ian Mcewan
Image
All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
Ian Mcewan
Image
No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
Ian Mcewan
Image
i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
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
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
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
Ian Mcewan