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 McewanWhen 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.
Ian McewanScreenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.
Ian McewanIt 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 McewanAbove all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.
Ian McewanWasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
Ian McewanWhen people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.
Ian McewanI'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 McewanDearest Cecilia, Youโd 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 donโt think I can blame the heat.
Ian McewanGirls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.
Ian McewanWe know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.
Ian McewanIt's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.
Ian McewanA story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
Ian McewanAnd she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage.
Ian McewanReading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.
Ian McewanThis commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer - a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight.
Ian Mcewan...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
Ian McewanAt 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 McewanRebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
Ian McewanFor children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are?
Ian McewanWe knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.
Ian McewanI like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But Iโve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what youโve done before.
Ian McewanThere did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.
Ian McewanWas 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 McewanIt marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
Ian McewanThere are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.
Ian McewanIt troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.
Ian McewanMy biggest fear, I think falling from a great height. If I want to keep myself awake at night I imagine I'm on the top of the North or South Tower in 9/11, wondering whether I'm going to be burnt to death or I'm going to jump. And I think I would burn to death. And yet I'm impressed by the fact that hundreds didn't.
Ian McewanIt'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.
Ian Mcewan