Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" I don't really believe in evil at all. "
Ian Mcewan
Believe
Evil
Really
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends. "
Ian Mcewan
Child
Close Friends
Never
" Politics is the enemy of the imagination. "
Ian Mcewan
Enemy
Politics
Imagination
" If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy. "
Ian Mcewan
If I Could
Perfect
Happy
" I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.' "
Ian Mcewan
Somebody
Said
Who
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters. "
Ian Mcewan
Could
You
Spy
" 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
" 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
" I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress. "
Ian Mcewan
Strangers
Place
Live
" 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
" 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
" What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike? "
Ian Mcewan
Strike
Wants
Reader
" Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative. "
Ian Mcewan
Narrative
Most
Information
" 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
" I often don't read reviews. "
Ian Mcewan
Read
Reviews
Often
" I don't hold grudges. "
Ian Mcewan
Grudges
Hold
" I'm quite good at not writing. "
Ian Mcewan
Good
Writing
Quite
" We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences. "
Ian Mcewan
Arts
Relation
Sciences
" One has to have the courage of one's pessimism. "
Ian Mcewan
Pessimism
Courage
" 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