I don't hold grudges.
IAN MCEWAN The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel r...
IAN MCEWAN The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literatu...
IAN MCEWAN It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it&...
IAN MCEWAN I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them....
IAN MCEWAN Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and the...
IAN MCEWAN It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're...
IAN MCEWAN Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.
IAN MCEWAN One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.
IAN MCEWAN I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent...
IAN MCEWAN I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.
IAN MCEWAN What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and...
IAN MCEWAN I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.
IAN MCEWAN You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
IAN MCEWAN I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don&#...
IAN MCEWAN One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any fra...
IAN MCEWAN True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
IAN MCEWAN Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
IAN MCEWAN You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared...
IAN MCEWAN Wie wohlhabend, wie einflussreich sie waren, wie sie prosperiert hatten unter einer Regierung, die s...
IAN MCEWAN One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.
IAN MCEWAN By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State
IAN MCEWAN It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales ...
IAN MCEWAN By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justic...
IAN MCEWAN Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to...
IAN MCEWAN I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be const...
IAN MCEWAN Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social w...
IAN MCEWAN Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily ...
IAN MCEWAN A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and...
IAN MCEWAN From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, an...
IAN MCEWAN A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
IAN MCEWAN It's just a little dusty valley. There is nothing there. We're going to have to develop the entire s...
IAN MCEWAN They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but ob...
IAN MCEWAN I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, versio...
IAN MCEWAN As he pushed her by the shoulder toward the gate, the rising howl commenced. Nightmares had beome a ...
IAN MCEWAN I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time ...
IAN MCEWAN When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to k...
IAN MCEWAN I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock......
IAN MCEWAN I now bear a kind of stigmata. I am in the computer as having been denied entry to the United States...
IAN MCEWAN This was a tough decision, but it was driven by our need for higher temperatures. This is not a cost...
IAN MCEWAN It is an excellent offer.
IAN MCEWAN Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a g...
IAN MCEWAN Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom...
IAN MCEWAN What can it be about low temperatures
that sharpens the edges of objects?
IAN MCEWAN But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted he...
IAN MCEWAN It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply lik...
IAN MCEWAN It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully...
IAN MCEWAN Thing is, we could discuss it out loud in front of the gentlemen over there, or you could get off my...
IAN MCEWAN His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of diss...
IAN MCEWAN This sense of absence had been growing ... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides ...
IAN MCEWAN In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise...
IAN MCEWAN It would have been possible to back out of his engagements by assuming the license of the free artis...
IAN MCEWAN Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on thei...
IAN MCEWAN Once he had found his seat he removed his shoe and discovered a flattened black mass of chewing gum ...
IAN MCEWAN ...when Clive stood from the piano and shuffled to the doorway to turn out the studio lights, and lo...
IAN MCEWAN Clive thought of his work in totality, of how varied and rich it seemed whenever he was able to rais...
IAN MCEWAN ...but hearing and seeing only the bright hurry-gurdy carousel os his twirling thoughts, and the sam...
IAN MCEWAN But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were three gins and a bottle of wine
IAN MCEWAN When she found a place of her own
and packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him...
IAN MCEWAN In his corner of West London, and in his self-preoccupied daily round, it was easy for Clive to thin...
IAN MCEWAN Then, with an extended, falling glissando of disgust, the whole string section, plus flutes and picc...
IAN MCEWAN He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your e...
IAN MCEWAN He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your e...
IAN MCEWAN The following day the editor presided over a sudued meeting with his senior staff. Tony Montano sat ...
IAN MCEWAN Each day he made attempts … but produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his ...
IAN MCEWAN Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt service people do up every single button?
IAN MCEWAN As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not j...
IAN MCEWAN and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere...
IAN MCEWAN Over a quarter of a century ago she and Vernon had made a household for almost a year, in a tiny roo...
IAN MCEWAN There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.
IAN MCEWAN We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social...
IAN MCEWAN In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise...
IAN MCEWAN He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make som...
IAN MCEWAN We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social s...
IAN MCEWAN He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would b...
IAN MCEWAN If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be tru...
IAN MCEWAN Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intent...
IAN MCEWAN It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative len...
IAN MCEWAN I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.
IAN MCEWAN The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had be...
IAN MCEWAN No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.
IAN MCEWAN It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way t...
IAN MCEWAN He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to r...
IAN MCEWAN Narrative Tension is primarily about witholding information.
IAN MCEWAN Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose.
IAN MCEWAN This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.
IAN MCEWAN At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
IAN MCEWAN What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer,...
IAN MCEWAN i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
IAN MCEWAN Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth ...
IAN MCEWAN It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and ther...
IAN MCEWAN A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send though...
IAN MCEWAN Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.
IAN MCEWAN Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
IAN MCEWAN That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to c...
IAN MCEWAN I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My...
IAN MCEWAN It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstandi...
IAN MCEWAN She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing...
IAN MCEWAN For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. O...
IAN MCEWAN He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not livi...
IAN MCEWAN The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been...
IAN MCEWAN Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheap...
IAN MCEWAN The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surroundin...
IAN MCEWAN Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves ...
IAN MCEWAN By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State's crime whe...
IAN MCEWAN There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in t...
IAN MCEWAN Quantum mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathe...
IAN MCEWAN It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
IAN MCEWAN Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
IAN MCEWAN She lay in the dark and knew everything.
IAN MCEWAN ...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.
IAN MCEWAN She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundam...
IAN MCEWAN Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do ma...
IAN MCEWAN My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able t...
IAN MCEWAN The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you're locked into the huma...
IAN MCEWAN It was always the view of my parents," Emily said, "that hot weather encouraged loose morals among y...
IAN MCEWAN I've spent all my life playing roles that illustrious people have played before me.
GERALDINE MCEWAN The worst mistake a writer can make is to assume everyone has an imagination.
ANDREW MCEWAN Actually I don't compete without them.
DELROY MCEWAN I ran my personal best time of 47.9 seconds in that relay.
DELROY MCEWAN But taking the money doesn't bother people at all. Everyone figures the insurance will pay for it.
JAMES MCEWAN People hate the fact that they kidnapped people, including a little child.
JAMES MCEWAN I just threw it on net and it popped in. Everyone is just really buying into the system right now an...
JAMES MCEWAN A book tour is not a good opportunity to let your mind wander. You have to pay attention, remember s...
IAN FRAZIER Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
IAN FLEMING There is something magical about three you know - a trio is tight and nicely economical.
IAN WILLIAMS Seventy years old! How did that happen? I was part of the generation that wasn't going to die.
IAN MCSHANE Training a puppy is like raising a child. Every single interaction is a training opportunity.
IAN DUNBAR Once you're halfway home, you know that you can probably get the rest of the way there.
JANIS IAN I'm still swimming.
IAN THORPE For myself, losing is not coming second. It's getting out of the water knowing you could have do...
IAN THORPE I've enjoyed training again, I've enjoyed pushing myself in the pool and I'll keep on sw...
IAN THORPE Maybe one of the only things I do well: I cook like a maniac! I would be a chef if I weren't an ...
IAN SOMERHALDER I don't ever want anything to come in the way of me truthfully telling a story.
IAN SOMERHALDER You spend enough time on set as an actor and it's great when a director was at some point an act...
IAN SOMERHALDER The coming together of like-minded individuals through action is what's needed to see wide sprea...
IAN SOMERHALDER I don't know how to do anything else other than be an actor. If I wasn't in this, I would be...
IAN SOMERHALDER Kids are meeting in coffee shops and basements figuring out what's unsustainable in their commun...
IAN SOMERHALDER They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. It's the same way with women... or...
IAN SOMERHALDER Oceans are one of the most important things in the world now and that is a national security threat ...
IAN SOMERHALDER I can't let time move on without fighting tooth and nail and hopefully being a part of a revolut...
IAN SOMERHALDER Every love story needs a catalyst of some sort.
IAN SOMERHALDER I don't care how hot a girl is - if she doesn't like animals, it would be a major, major pro...
IAN SOMERHALDER I've sorta learned that I'm so tired of taking myself so seriously. It's so great to sho...
IAN SOMERHALDER A lot of things that happen in the world make me a bit crazy.
IAN SOMERHALDER You can't get anywhere without the people who have come into your life.
IAN SOMERHALDER There are always decades that interest people. For me, that's the Roaring Twenties.
IAN SOMERHALDER I always try to be reasonable and effective.
IAN SMITH Every human being makes mistakes.
IAN SMITH Declaring independence was the most traumatic decision I had to live up to. Because I didn't wan...
IAN SMITH Freedom. And Justice. If you have those two, it covers everything. You must stick to those principle...
IAN SMITH Status based on wealth is an old-fashioned idea; I find it repugnant, actually.
IAN SCHRAGER My best vacation was renting a boat and motoring along the Adriatic, going along the Croatian coast,...
IAN SCHRAGER I have to be more universal than my projects, but no less innovative.
IAN SCHRAGER The trimmings of wealth are not as important to me and my generation as they were to my parents'...
IAN SCHRAGER I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in Brooklyn. It's what gave me my drive to succeed,...
IAN SCHRAGER Great ideas have no attachment to either money or class.
IAN SCHRAGER I'm not into nostalgia, and I only look back to find lessons.
IAN SCHRAGER Good design is good business.
IAN SCHRAGER People say you should go out at the top but I was enjoying my football so much. Robbie Fowler's ...
IAN RUSH I like the Stereophonics. I know the lead singer, Kelly Jones, and there's the Welsh connection.
IAN RUSH I just wanted to play as long as I could. When you stop playing, you're not going to get it back...
IAN RUSH I think great players can play in any year, that's why they're great. A lot of it is down to...
IAN RUSH I've done my coaching badges, I've got my Pro Licence, but I enjoy what I'm doing now. I...
IAN RUSH The only thing I can cook is Welsh rarebit.
IAN RUSH There are a lot of famous comedians from Liverpool, then obviously the Beatles, and the football clu...
IAN RUSH This is why cup finals are so special because on the day anyone can beat anyone. That's what it&...
IAN RUSH I was so shy when I was younger. When I first went to Liverpool I didn't say a word for a year.
IAN RUSH You can enjoy yourself, but you need to look after yourself as well.
IAN RUSH It's different from Liverpool. Boston seems to be a friendly place.
IAN RUSH I love horse racing, I play golf, and I love travelling.
IAN RUSH Mainly it's the parents who remember me. But the kids today, what they do is go and Google you. ...
IAN RUSH Moving from Wales to Italy is like moving to a different country.
IAN RUSH I've got a place in Portugal, which I like very much, but I've just been working in Malaysia...
IAN RUSH I couldn't settle in Italy - it was like living in a foreign country.
IAN RUSH In India, kids need someone to look up to. They've got it in cricket: they have Tendulkar and ot...
IAN RUSH You've got to have a dream... if you don't have any big dreams, nothing happens.
IAN RUSH I don't have many friends. It's not because I'm a misanthrope. It's because I'm ...
IAN RANKIN A lot of writers, especially crime writers, have an image that we think we're trying to keep up ...
IAN RANKIN Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.
IAN RANKIN No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it'...
IAN RANKIN My first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers. And even after having published five or s...
IAN RANKIN You need a great idea, but then you've got to carry it through. If you get it right, you're ...
IAN RANKIN I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and...
IAN RANKIN I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. I...
IAN RANKIN The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon yo...
IAN RANKIN I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think...
IAN RANKIN I think writers have to be proactive: they've got to use new technology and social media. Yes, i...
IAN RANKIN At all times, think like a writer, and keep those antennae twitching - that way, you pick up new ide...
IAN RANKIN I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in...
IAN RANKIN I remember back in the early '70s, when I had a disastrous Grand Prix, my wife, Lynn, said to me...
IAN MILLAR It's always a thrill to wear the flag and ride for Canada in any competition, but especially the...
IAN MILLAR I would never want to be selected to a team just because I am going to set a record. It's critic...
IAN MILLAR I work out every morning for an hour while in front of the news channel or business channels, then I...
IAN MILLAR When we train a horse to do a certain job, we're training the horse to be like a soldier, and ye...
IAN MILLAR The minute I put my leg on a horse and say, 'Come on, let's go,' I absolutely believe th...
IAN MILLAR Obviously, as you get a little older, you are not going to be quite as quick or quite as strong, and...
IAN MILLAR If you persevere long enough, if you do the right things long enough, the right things will happen.
IAN MILLAR I come from the liberal side of thinking: Better one guilty man should walk free than one innocent m...
IAN MCSHANE Blackbeard is probably the most infamous pirate who ever lived. He's one of those characters for...
IAN MCSHANE