Ian Mcewan Quotes

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the result of sudden impulse and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast.

What I'm interested in is human beings alone.

The best subjects are always people, who never fail to amaze me by their unpredictability.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.

The 21st century does not like tidy minds.

I think that life is messy and that human beings are insane.

I can measure the motion of bodies but I cannot measure human folly.

I was suddenly struck by how dissimilar we were. It occurred to me that if Grace and I were objects, she would be an elaborate digital clock, synced up with the World Clock in London with technical perfection, and I’d be a snow globe – shaken memories in a glass ball.

Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable.

All the world does as it is supposed to, except for humans. Maybe that's why you so often want to kill each other.

There is no accounting for human beings.

You always ask that. Why. Like there's an answer for everything. Not everybody has your life, you know, or your family. In your life, things happen for reasons. People make sense. But that's not my life. Nobody in my life makes sense.

People in this world are not often logical.

Love: the sickest of Irony’s sick jokes. The place where logic and order go to die.

For once, you're going to hear something that doesn't fit into your neat, compartmentalized world of order and logic and reason.

I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.

In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.

We give people way too much credit. People just get crazy.

To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.

Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.

I don't know -- maybe the world has two different kinds of people, and for one kind the world is this completely logical, rice pudding place, and for the other it's all hit-or-miss macaroni gratin.

They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.