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

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Years
Like
Woolf
Sounding
Virginia
Pounds
Risk
Year
Live

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.
Ian Mcewan
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I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.
Ian Mcewan
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Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
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The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
Ian Mcewan
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The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
Ian Mcewan
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If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
Ian Mcewan
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A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
Ian Mcewan
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime.
Ian Mcewan
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From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
Ian Mcewan
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But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
Ian Mcewan
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When anything can happen, everything matters.
Ian Mcewan
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When people ask, Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?, I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.
Ian Mcewan
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I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you’ve done before.
Ian Mcewan
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...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
Ian Mcewan
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Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
Ian Mcewan
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There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.
Ian Mcewan
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It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
Ian Mcewan
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Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.
Ian Mcewan