He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.

— Ian McEwan

He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them as real as a haunting. --Solar

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you're inside them.

— Ian McEwan

How quickly the dead faded into each other,

— Ian McEwan

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readers neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could gauge the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two.

— Ian McEwan

... I experienced a sudden ache -- part desolation, part panic -- to observe the speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person.

— Ian McEwan

I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.

— Ian McEwan

If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.

— Ian McEwan

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.

— Ian McEwan