How it works
Logo@2xLogo mindzip color
Login

Ian Mcewan

ft

Quotes
28

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan
I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.
Ian Mcewan
The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
Ian Mcewan
What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan
In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.
Ian Mcewan
One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.
Ian Mcewan
You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
Ian Mcewan
One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.
Ian Mcewan
I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.
Ian Mcewan
Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan
What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.
Ian Mcewan
Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.
Ian Mcewan
Not being boring is quite a challenge.
Ian Mcewan
Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.
Ian Mcewan
I don't hold grudges.
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan
True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
Ian Mcewan
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
Ian Mcewan
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.
Ian Mcewan

We use cookies to understand our websites traffic and offer our website visitors personalized experience. To find out more, click ‘More Information’. In addition, please, read our Privacy policy.