Quotes from Ian Mcewan

I often don't read reviews.

Not being boring is quite a challenge.

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

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 was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.

I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.

Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.

Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.

Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.

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.

What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.

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

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.

I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.

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

I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.

I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.