Ian Mcewan
Ian Mcewan
Ian Russell McEwan CBE FRSA FRSLis an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth21 June 1948
common-sense daylight common
Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
kindness thinking despair
I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, ...
waiting doing-nothing emotion
I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.
enduring-love outcomes information
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.
character self views
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
two littles might
It 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.
character female desert
Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.
clever feelings cheerful
And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
terrible-events waiting mind
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.
guilty innocent evidence
Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
men arguing dead-man
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
leap rate grows
Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.
school years names
Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.
superstitions littles said
Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.