Ian Mcewan Quotes

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Ian Mcewan

Profession : Author

Birth : June 21, 1948

One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.

Ian Mcewan

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

Ian Mcewan

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Ian Mcewan

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

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

Not being boring is quite a challenge.

Ian Mcewan

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

Ian Mcewan

I don't really believe in evil at all.

Ian Mcewan

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

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

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

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

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

We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences.

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

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

Ian Mcewan

I'm quite good at not writing.

Ian Mcewan

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

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

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