Faith & Spirit Quote by Ian Mcewan

McEwan is describing the writerly trance with a surgeon's chill: you think you're steering, but the book is steering you. "Controlled passivity" is the perfect oxymoron for craft at its highest level - a discipline that depends on surrender. The hand loosens, the ego backs off, and narrative gravity takes over. What looks like modesty is also a warning about authorship itself: the moment you set out to "justify the ways of God to man" (Milton's thunderous mission statement for Paradise Lost), you're already flirting with the possibility that your real talent lies elsewhere.

The line works because it smuggles a whole theory of attention into a joke. Readers don't reward righteousness; they reward electricity. Satan is agency, conflict, seduction - the character who acts while Heaven legislates. McEwan's subtext is that moral intention is not the same thing as moral effect. A novelist can aim for edification and still produce fascination with transgression, because story runs on desire, not doctrine. That isn't a cynical shrug so much as an admission that art exposes the parts of us we pretend not to have.

Contextually, it's also a nod to McEwan's own terrain: polite surfaces, turbulent interiors, characters who rationalize, betray, and surprise themselves. The "state" he names is the writer accepting that the most honest book may be the one that refuses to behave - and that the devil, in fiction, often carries the sharper truth.