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" Not being boring is quite a challenge. "
Ian Mcewan
Boring
Being
Quite
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" 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. "
Ian Mcewan
Want
Human
Moment
" Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater. "
Ian Mcewan
Week
Some People
People
" I often don't read reviews. "
Ian Mcewan
Read
Reviews
Often
" One has to have the courage of one's pessimism. "
Ian Mcewan
Pessimism
Courage
" 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
" 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
Darkness
Think
Religion
" 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
" You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other. "
Ian Mcewan
Stories
Out
People
" I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends. "
Ian Mcewan
Child
Close Friends
Never
" 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 want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress. "
Ian Mcewan
Strangers
Place
Live
" 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
" 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
" 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
Confidence
Think
Strength
" 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
" Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition. "
Ian Mcewan
Tradition
Celebrate
Culture
" 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. "
Ian Mcewan
Tools
Never
Stand
" I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.' "
Ian Mcewan
Somebody
Said
Who
" In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot. "
Ian Mcewan
Writer
Fellow
Letter
" I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive. "
Ian Mcewan
Quite
Funny
Determined
" 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
Resistance
Successful
Duty
" 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
Me
Done
Regret
" 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
Debate
Matter
Become
" 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
" I'm quite good at not writing. "
Ian Mcewan
Good
Writing
Quite
" 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
" 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
" I don't hold grudges. "
Ian Mcewan
Grudges
Hold
" 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
" 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. "
Ian Mcewan
You
Trouble
Problems