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" 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. "

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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. "

Ian Mcewan

Adolescence

Experience

Childhood

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

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

" I'm quite good at not writing. "

" Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

Ian Mcewan

Example

Poet

" 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. "

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

Ian Mcewan

Risk

Could

" 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. "

" We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I often don't read reviews. "

" Not being boring is quite a challenge. "

" 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. "

Ian Mcewan

Become

Great

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

" If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy. "

" 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. "

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

" True intelligence requires fabulous imagination. "