Ian Mcewan Quotes

I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I’m an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.

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.

I wouldn’t mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don’t play the guitar.

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.

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.

I often don’t read reviews.

Now, I’m an atheist. I really don’t believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.

It’s good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it’s very pleasing after writing something like ‘Atonement’ or ‘On Chesil Beach,’ which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.

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.

At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

I don’t believe there’s any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

What is it precisely, that feeling of ‘returning’ from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger – then it fades, but never completely.

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.

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.

The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you’re locked into the human project and you want it to flourish.

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I’ll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

I’m quite good at not writing.

Something is missing in our culture. We can’t quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It’s like waves washing layers off your skin.

London in the ’70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel – especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.

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.

I’ve yet to meet somebody who said, ‘Your stories are so revolting I couldn’t read them.’

Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves.

Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I’m a hesitater.

My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren’t able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively.

As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn’t as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.

I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.