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Books Quotes by Ian McEwan

41 Books quotes by Ian McEwan

All Books quotes Ian McEwan’s page

Ian McEwan says every novel has a secret spy feel and that stories without women are like empty deserts. He enjoys when readers react with strong passion, and he compares writing a novel to traveling with only a sketchy map. He also notes that journalism can feel more appropriate after a terrible event.

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What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

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I often don't read reviews.

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

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Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

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

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Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

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Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.

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I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'

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Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

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You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

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I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity…

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My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular…

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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…

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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…

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The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing…

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Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

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“We were the only customers downstairs in the shop and there were no windows and only two dim bulbs, without shades. There…

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I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it…

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“Anyone watching me might have thought I was consulting a reference book, I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I…

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“Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about…

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“The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded…

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I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage.…

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When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers.…

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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…

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“We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of…

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A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and…

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“He did. He researched her. Someone told him that she had a special interest in John Milton. It did not take long…

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“You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming…

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“I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew…

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“The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, she no longer…

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“Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.”

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

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I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in…

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I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such…

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“I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between - I gave them all the same…

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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,…

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How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or…

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“My ideal state as a reader when I’m reading other people is feeling I’m vaguely wasting my time when I’m not reading…

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

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“The novel is too capacious, inclusive, unruly, and personal for perfection. Too long, sometimes too much like life.”

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More by Ian McEwan

“As you will see, we do not believe that artists have an obligation to strike up attitudes to the war. Indeed, they are wise…

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

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.

“It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.”

“While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling…

“Once, on a walk by a river- Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow- his daughter quoted to him an opening…

“Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or,…

Who you get, and how it works out- there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice…

“On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have…

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

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 would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually…

“Words, as I'm beginning to appreciate, can make things true.”

I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in…

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it…