Ian Mcewan Quotes
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One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.
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Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.
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I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'
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My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively.
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Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
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By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.
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Not being boring is quite a challenge.
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The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
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Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
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Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves.
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We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences.
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As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.
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The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you're locked into the human project and you want it to flourish.
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I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.
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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.
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You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.
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Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.
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And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?
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If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
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It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.
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At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
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Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.
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You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.