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"In difficult moments it's sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can't, move on to the second best thing."
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"There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either."
"It is only in our decisions that we are important."
"You must not make hasty decisions because they make you do what you would not have done normally."
"One thing that most comic artists avoid is showing decisions. They show action, sure, and they show results, but they don't show (because it's difficult to show) the hero or the villain making a choice."
"It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good."
"See that the President, the Cabinet and staff are informed. If cut out of the information flow, their decisions may be poor, not made, or not confidently or persuasively implemented."
"The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years."
"Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision."
"The two important things I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan
"One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me."
"The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained."
"I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness...Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self...God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually."
"Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it's a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are."
"She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?"
"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?"
"He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning."
"She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten."
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