Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Emotions
Problem
Father
Related Quotes:
" I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends. "
Ian Mcewan
Child
Close Friends
Never
" Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition. "
Ian Mcewan
Tradition
Celebrate
Culture
" Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god. "
Ian Mcewan
Sense
Believe
God
" I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar. "
Ian Mcewan
Successful
Rock
Guitar
" 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. "
Ian Mcewan
Man
Play
Know
" True intelligence requires fabulous imagination. "
Ian Mcewan
Intelligence
True
Imagination
" 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. "
Ian Mcewan
Scottish
British
You
" At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year. "
Ian Mcewan
Risk
Could
Like
" 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
Good
Justice
People
" You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters. "
Ian Mcewan
Could
You
Spy
" Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin. "
Ian Mcewan
You
Waves
Layers
" What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike? "
Ian Mcewan
Strike
Wants
Reader
" I often don't read reviews. "
Ian Mcewan
Read
Reviews
Often
" 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. "
Ian Mcewan
Trying
Literature
Thought
" One has to have the courage of one's pessimism. "
Ian Mcewan
Pessimism
Courage
" 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
" What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely. "
Ian Mcewan
Returning
Never
Feeling
" 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. "
Ian Mcewan
Parents
Education
Books
" If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy. "
Ian Mcewan
If I Could
Perfect
Happy
" I'm quite good at not writing. "
Ian Mcewan
Good
Writing
Quite
" 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
End
Social
Secrecy
" The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject. "
Ian Mcewan
Change
People
Way
" 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. "
Ian Mcewan
Half
Better
Thinks
" 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
Time
Always
Writing
" Politics is the enemy of the imagination. "
Ian Mcewan
Enemy
Politics
Imagination
" Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. "
Ian Mcewan
Reading
Greatest
Know
" 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
More
Great
" 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
Interesting
God
End
" 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
Bold
You
Run
" 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
You
People
Problem