Guess quote

Ian Mcewan [1948-0] British

Rank: 101
Author, Novelist

Ian Russell McEwan CBE FRSA FRSL is an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945", and also in 2008 The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".

Intelligence, Attitude, Courage, Forgiveness, Imagination, Strength

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.	Strength	101
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.	Forgiveness	102
You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.		103
I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.		104
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.		105
I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.		106
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.		107
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.		108
Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.		109
True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.	Imagination, Intelligence	110
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.		111
What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.		112
One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.	Courage	113
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.		114
Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.		115
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.		116
It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in.		117
The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.		118
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.		119
Not being boring is quite a challenge.		120
What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?	Attitude	121
I don't hold grudges.		122
Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.		123
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.		124
My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me.		125
In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.		126
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.	Intelligence	201
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.		202
Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.		203
You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.		204
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.		205
The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.		206
As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.		207
I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.		208
Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.		209
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.		210
Politics is the enemy of the imagination.		211
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.		212
I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'		213
I'm quite good at not writing.		214
Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.		215
I often don't read reviews.		216
At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.		217
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.		218
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.		219
I don't really believe in evil at all.		220
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.		221
I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.		222
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.		223
How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length.		224
We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences.		225
If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.		226

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