Ian Mcewan

“One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.”

“Politics is the enemy of the imagination.”

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

“I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time.”

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

“I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar.”

“One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.”

“It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in.”

“I don't really believe in evil at all.”

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

“What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.”

“When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work.”

“London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.”

“By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.”

“I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.”

“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.”

“I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”