Ian Mcewan Quotes

I was quite nerdy at school. I skipped a year and won a scholarship in chemistry.

I'm a child of academics.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

My parents are wonderful, practical, sensible people, and the expectation was that I would study something academic.

Most Indians go into education. Their parents just push them into education like parents in Australia push them into sports.

Amazing that the human race has taken enough time out from thinking about food or sex to create the arts and sciences.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the sciences, ornamental and profound.

We have therefore decided that in the most pleasant city of Naples there should be teaching of the arts and of all disciplines, so that those who are starved for knowledge will find it in our own kingdom, and will not be forced, in their search for knowledge, to become pilgrims and to beg in foreign lands

Schools are not exam factories for the rat race.

I think we were raised in a nice Texas Jewish family where education was the most important thing, and close behind that was the arts. It was emphasized and expected that we'd play piano.

I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

While my parents never had the time or money to secure university education themselves, they were adamant that their children should. In comfort and in love, we were taught the joys of knowledge and of work well done. I only regret that neither my mother nor my father could live to see the day I would accept the Nobel Prize.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

The wrong things are predominantly stressed in the schools - things remote from the student's experience and need.

I got into New College, Oxford. The ethos was that you could work - or not.

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

It wasn't just OK to achieve in my family - it was expected.

My father was a doctor, but he was what I would call an intellectual - very well-read and very interested in knowledge. He insisted that I get as much education as my brothers.

I always loved science. And in fact, I got a science award in high school. I mean, I loved science, but I think I loved literature more.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

The rule with my mom was that the only way that I could be an actress when I was young was that I continued to go to public school and get straight A's in all my classes.

The American people frankly have been, over many, many years - to be blunt - fat, dumb and happy. If they want their children to compete with children in India, China or Korea, they better get them a far better education.