Ian Mcewan Quotes
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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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I often don't read reviews.
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Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you.
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I don't hold grudges.
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I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.
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My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me.
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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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In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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I don't really believe in evil at all.
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True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
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Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.
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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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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
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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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I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.
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Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.