Quotes by Ian Mcewan

“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 now bear a kind of stigmata. I am in the computer as having been denied entry to the United States and that is really bad news. They can put things into that computer, but they never take them out.”

“Politics is the enemy of the imagination.”

“One has to have the courage of ones pessimism.”

“This was a tough decision, but it was driven by our need for higher temperatures. This is not a cost-cutting measure.”

“Its just a little dusty valley. There is nothing there. Were going to have to develop the entire site.”

“It is an excellent offer.”

“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.”

“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.”

“By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the States crime when it sets out to crush that individuality.”

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.

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 Ill never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.

One has to have the courage of ones pessimism.

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 thats even possible, interested me.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.