527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

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

Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State

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

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics...

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.

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

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.