Ian Mcewan Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.
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I often don't read reviews.
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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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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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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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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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True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
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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 wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
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I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.
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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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For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
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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.