Ian Mcewan Quotes

I had always secretly wanted to write a novel.

I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

I don't think I have a very novelistic brain. I like to read, but I don't know if I could ever write a novel.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

Personally, I've made myself a very small window of what I enjoy in this business, which is I love being a big part of the storytelling process.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.