In a Jan. 3, 2002, interview in the Guardian, McEwan said, "When I started writing in the early 1970s I was struck by the ambition of American writers—William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Updike, Roth. I thought that perhaps it was something to do with class—with the free-roaming nature of American society that allows a writer like Saul Bellow to be so much of the street on one hand and yet such an unashamed intellectual on the other. And there seemed something rather pinched about English writing that maybe had something to do with class and our education system and our inability to talk for a whole society. Since then writing in this country has got a lot bolder and has had infusions of new blood, as it were. ... But I still feel that it's quite hard for a British novelist to be so engagingly intellectual, so inquisitive and awestruck about the world, and yet be down there on the street. I still feel that class is a limiting element."