Ian McEwan

These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel.

She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.

She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.

But this inglorious revolution wasn't for me. I didn't want a sex shop in every town.

In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition.

The light of artistic creation is also blinding.The artist can__ see the suffering he causesto those around him. And the__l neverunderstand the purity of his goal, how the heatof his invention won__ melt the ice in his heart.He must be ruthless!No religion, no purpose except this:Make something perfect before you die.Life is short, art is for all time

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.

Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.

Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?

All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.

But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me _ they were all aged _ I worried that what showed in my face was pity.

It was always the view of my parents," Emily said, "that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

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

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.

So here I am, upside down in a woman.

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.