Ian Russell McEwan, CBE, FRSA, FRSL is an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945” and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the “100 most powerful people in British culture”. McEwan began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. His first two novels, The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers, earned him the nickname “Ian Macabre”. These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. His novel Enduring Love was adapted into a film of the same name. He won the Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam. His following novel, Atonement, garnered acclaim and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. His later novels have included The Children Act, Nutshell, and Machines Like Me. May these Ian Mcewan Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “When anything can happen, everything matters.” Ian Mcewan

2. “The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.” Ian Mcewan

3. “We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.” Ian Mcewan

4. “What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.” Ian Mcewan

5. “Not being boring is quite a challenge.” Ian Mcewan

6. “He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.” Ian Mcewan

7. “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

8. “In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.” Ian Mcewan

9. “Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?” Ian Mcewan

10. “A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.” Ian Mcewan

11. “I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days).” Ian Mcewan

12. “A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.” Ian Mcewan

13. “You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.” Ian Mcewan

14. “A 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 Mcewan

15. “Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.” Ian Mcewan

16. “I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.” Ian Mcewan

17. “When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion.” Ian Mcewan

18. “The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.” Ian Mcewan

19. “Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we’re ever going to be at peace with each other, the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.” Ian Mcewan

20. “He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.” Ian Mcewan

21. “Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.” Ian Mcewan

22. “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.” Ian Mcewan

23. “I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.” Ian Mcewan

24. “I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.” Ian Mcewan

25. “This 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

26. “The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.” Ian Mcewan

27. “It’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

28. “When its gone, you’ll know what a gift love was. you’ll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.” Ian Mcewan

29. “Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.” Ian Mcewan

30. “True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.” Ian Mcewan

31. “For 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 Mcewan

32. “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.” Ian Mcewan

33. “There 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 Mcewan

34. “The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.” Ian Mcewan

35. “Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.” Ian Mcewan

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Check Out Ian McEwan interview (2002):

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