Ian Mcewan Quotes
I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.
Quotes to Explore
-
Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.
-
Since entering office, I have focused on working with the people and businesses of New Hampshire to build a stronger economic future through innovation, and in no sector is innovation needed more than our energy industry.
-
The biggest challenge is always the governments - they try to stop all good things. I try to stay away from them as much as I can, as I know if someone can destroy something good, it's the government.
-
Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.
-
Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
-
The good reviews that people have told me about through the years haven't really helped me do my job. So it's kind of like, if your hair turns out right you want to go out, you don't just want to stay in and look in the mirror. That's kind of what reading a review is like to me; it's like reveling in something that's just one night.
-
We Germans should know that we're good at constructing cars, and we have a lot of good qualities. But we're not the funniest.
-
Most of Planned Parenthood's work focuses on health care for low-income women: things like screenings for breast cancer and diabetes, and family planning.
-
Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do.
-
Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories.
-
I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.
-
Obviously people read the books in order to be entertained.
-
I used to like humorous people in the past, but these days, I like serious people more.
-
Some people care too much. I think it's called love.
-
If the first bite is with the eye and the second with the nose, some people will never take that third, actual bite if the food in question smells too fishy, fermented or cheesy.
-
The good thing about execution issues are that they are within our control.
-
I love Washington, D.C.; I love this country, but I think over the last hundred years we've built up would I call an arrogant empire: people who think the rest of us are too stupid to make our own decisions.
-
Maybe subconsciously I feel I was meant to work hard for a living.
-
France is a country where life is more than just your job. I feel like, in America, you're defined by your work. But in France, you can actually have a whole dinner conversation with someone without once discussing what you do.
-
But Nature cast me for the part she found me best fitted for, and I have had to play it, and must play it till the curtain falls.
-
She'll carelessly cut you and laugh while you're bleeding.
-
Our actions determine our dispositions.
-
But we are not going to stand by and go back to allowing people with preexisting conditions to be discriminated against, go back to the situation where people can be thrown off their insurance simply because they become seriously ill or you can't get on your parents' insurance after the age of 20.
-
I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.
