“It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.”
Source: Atonement
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Ian McEwan 80
British author 1948Related quotes
"Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word : The Madness of Lear" http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/maclean/nmr_lear.html, in Critics and Criticism : Ancient and Modern (1952), edited by R.S. Crane
Context: At a high level of universality, to write anything well, whether it be intellectual or imaginative, is to assume at least two obligations: to be intelligible and to be interesting. Intelligibility, too, has its levels of obligation, on the lowest of individual statements, and even on this level the obligation is never easy to fulfill and perhaps even to genius could be a nightmare if what the genius sought to represent was “madness.” Only to a limited degree, however, can individual statements be intelligible — and in many instances and for a variety of reasons the individual statements are meant to be obscure, as in “mad” speeches. Since full intelligibility depends upon the relations of individual statement to individual statement, the concept of intelligibility, fully expanded, includes order and completeness; for a fully intelligible exposition or poem having relations has parts, and all the parts ought to be there and add up to a whole. The second major obligation, that of being “interesting,” includes unexpectedness and suspense, for expository as well as imaginative writing should not be merely what the reader expected it would be — or why should it be written or read? — and the unexpected should not be immediately and totally announced (in other words, expository and imaginative writing should have suspense), for, if the whole is immediately known, why should the writer or reader proceed farther?
But the accomplished writer gives his selected material more than shape — he gives it proper size. For a piece of writing to have its proper size is an excellent thing, or otherwise it would be lacking in intelligibility or interest or both.

Oui interview (1979)

“Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”

"UFC 197 press conference" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75xAdA3uVeY (January 2016), Ultimate Fighting Championship, Zuffa, LLC
2010s, 2016
The Elements of the Spiritual Life: A Study in Ascetical Theology (1960), p. 104

Advocate interview (2015)
Context: At the end of the day and at the beginning of the day, I am a man who dresses up like a lady who is from outer space. Not everyone is going to get that. Not everyone is going to be on board with that. And not everyone is going to be able to swallow that.