Ian Mcewan Quotes

Author Image

Ian Mcewan

Profession : Author

Birth : June 21, 1948

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

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

Ian Mcewan

It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.

Ian Mcewan

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

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

Ian Mcewan

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

In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

Ian Mcewan

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

Ian Mcewan

I often don't read reviews.

Ian Mcewan

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

Ian Mcewan

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

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

Ian Mcewan

I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.

Ian Mcewan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Mcewan