Ian McEwan

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the real, suffocating overwhelming poison of escape.”

“In the long run, the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.”

“When you're young, you think you're unique. When you get older, you realize you're not.”

“It's the difficult thing that's worth doing.”

“He had been taught that bread unshared is bread unblessed.”

“We go on, because we don't know how to stop.”

“The world is not a courtroom. There is no judge, no jury, no prosecutor. There's just you and me.”

“Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”

“It's a good thing to be foolishly daring once in a while.”

“Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.”

“We are all storytellers. We all live in a network of stories. There isn't a stronger connection between people than storytelling.”

“The problem with being a writer is that you are making a product that has no defined value.”

“It was a mistake to think of houses as places where people lived. They were places where things accumulated.”

“What is it about the English countryside — why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?”

“There's a certain relief in change, even when it's from bad to worse... it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.”

“A story was a form of knowledge, of pedagogical transmission. It taught a lesson.”

“And what's the point of changing when I'm happy as I am?”