Ian Mcewan Quotes
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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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I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time.
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Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race.
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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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In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.
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I'm quite good at not writing.
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I don't hold grudges.
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It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
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I often don't read reviews.
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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.
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You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
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When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work.
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It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in.
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What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
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In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.
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It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
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What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.
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I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.
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True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
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A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
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I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
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The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
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How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length.