Ian Mcewan

“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.”

“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.”

“The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.”

“Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin.”

“Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I often don't read reviews.”