Ian Mcewan Quotes

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

"True intelligence requires fabulous imagination."

"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."

"I don't really believe in evil at all."

"Politics is the enemy of the imagination."

"I'm quite good at not writing."

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

"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 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."

"I often don't read reviews."

"By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage."

"One has to have the courage of one's pessimism."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Not being boring is quite a challenge."

"What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?"

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

"I don't hold grudges."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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