At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year. Ian Mcewan More Quotes by Ian Mcewan More Quotes From Ian Mcewan I find it very difficult to talk about unwritten works. It's never useful to start putting words casually around the flimsiest of notions. I finished Saturday only in late November and I'm now in the rather pleasant stage of traveling, reading and waiting. Ian Mcewan november reading waiting I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells. Ian Mcewan farewell sleep doors I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate. Ian Mcewan paraplegics painful nuts My biggest fear, I think falling from a great height. If I want to keep myself awake at night I imagine I'm on the top of the North or South Tower in 9/11, wondering whether I'm going to be burnt to death or I'm going to jump. And I think I would burn to death. And yet I'm impressed by the fact that hundreds didn't. Ian Mcewan night fall thinking None of us really either know the circumstances of our death or are likely to exert as much control over it as we would like to, but we can certainly have a little more say in it if we are terminally ill than we have at the moment. That's the element of dignity, but sure, life is very hard to organise even when you are fit and healthy. Ian Mcewan elements healthy littles Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think. Ian Mcewan sadness home thinking When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others. Ian Mcewan reason-why people thinking I'm not against religion in the sense that I feel I can't tolerate it, but I think written into the rubric of religion is the certainty of its own truth. And since there are 6,000 religions currently on the face of the earth, they can't all be right. And only the secular spirit can guarantee those freedoms and it's the secular spirit that they contest. Ian Mcewan rubrics earth thinking When people ask, "Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?," I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start. Ian Mcewan writing giving people I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination. Ian Mcewan cruelty imagination I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time. Ian Mcewan writing mean thinking 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. Ian Mcewan moment you work children 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. Ian Mcewan problems you politics energy 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. Ian Mcewan think you confidence strength 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. Ian Mcewan you god people past 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. Ian Mcewan deep saying me time Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater. Ian Mcewan some-people words day people Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin. Ian Mcewan waves skin you reading
