Top 30 Ian Mcewan Quotes

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

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.

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

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

What is it precisely, that feeling of ‘returning’ from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger – then it fades, but never completely.

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.

Now, I’m an atheist. I really don’t believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.

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.

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.

The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There’s a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.

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

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.

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

Not being boring is quite a challenge.

We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences.

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

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.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

I’m quite good at not writing.

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.

I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.

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.

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.

I don’t really believe in evil at all.

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

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.

Something is missing in our culture. We can’t quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.

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

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