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I'm quite good at not writing.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Quite
Writing
Good

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.
Ian Mcewan
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If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
Ian Mcewan
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He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
Ian Mcewan
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Someone once asked me If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you? And I said No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this.
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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Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
Ian Mcewan
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
Ian Mcewan
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All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.
Ian Mcewan
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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
Ian Mcewan
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She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?
Ian Mcewan
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He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.
Ian Mcewan
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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.
Ian Mcewan
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The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
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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This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.
Ian Mcewan
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I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
Ian Mcewan
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In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
Ian Mcewan