Quotes from Ian Mcewan

In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.

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

When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

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

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

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.

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.

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.

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

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 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.

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

True intelligence requires fabulous 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.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

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

My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively.

When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.