Date: 1998

"Every second of playing time involved writing out, note by note, the parts of up two dozen instruments, playing them back, making adjustments to the score, playing again, rewriting, then sitting in silence, listening to the inner ear synthesize and orchestrate the vertical array of scribbles and...

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"Anxieties about work transmuted into the baser metal of simple night fear: illness and death, abstractions that soon found their focus in the sensation he still felt in his left hand."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"In the third of the pictures he wore a boxy Chanel jacket and his gaze was turned downward; on some mental screen of selfhood he was a demure and feasible woman, but to an outsider what showed was evasion."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"Rose Garmony woke at six-thirty, and even before her eyes were open the names of her three children were on her mind, on her mind's tongue: Leonora, John, Candy."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"hese days he seemed to lack the dedication and clarity or emptiness of mind, and the action itself seemed quaintly outmoded and improbable, like lighting a fire by rubbing two sticks."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"The thought scrolled round and round in his mind--it went well, it went well."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"Though he sounded it guiltily on his inner ear, he would not let the word reach his lips."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were the three gins and a bottle of wine, and three hours later he was still staring a the score on the piano, in a hunched attitude of work, with a pencil in his hand and a frown, but hearing and seeing only the bright hurdy-gurdy carousel of...

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"Vernon slumped with his tea while his mental odometer tallied the insults and humiliations."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 1998

"His nakedness against the sheet, the wanton tangle of bedclothes by his ankle, and the sight of his own genitalia, at his age not yet fully obscured by the swell and spread of his gut, sent vague sexual thoughts floating across his mind like remote summer clouds."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)