Ian Mcewan Quotes - Page 7

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

I don't hold grudges.

I don't really believe in evil at all.

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

I often don't read reviews.

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

Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.

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

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

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.

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

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

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.

It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.

Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.

Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.

It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning.

The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.

Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.

Something has happened, hasn't it? ... It's like being up close to something so large you don't even see it. Even now, I'm not sure I can. But I know it's there.

I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote.

In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.