A biography for Ian Mcewanhasn’t been written yet.
“What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?”
“Not being boring is quite a challenge.”
“What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.”
“I'm quite good at not writing.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.”
“Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.”
“You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.”
“A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.”
“True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.”