Ian Mcewan Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“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.”

“Politics is the enemy of the imagination.”

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

“If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.”

“Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.”

“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.”

“We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”