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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I'm quite good at not writing.
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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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I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.
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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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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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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 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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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
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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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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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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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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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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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True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
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I don't really believe in evil at all.
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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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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
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Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.
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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.