Ian McEwan

It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.

Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.

He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.

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

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone__ thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone__ claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.

Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.

There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.

Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.

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

Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word.

You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.

_the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.

I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!

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