Quotes from Sweet Tooth

“I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“My needs were simple. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Non badavo granché a tematiche o felicità di stile, e saltavo le descrizioni minute di tempo atmosferico, paesaggi e interni. Volevo personaggi in cui potessi credere, e volevo provare curiosità per ciò che avrebbero vissuto. […] Romanzi a sensazione, alta letteratura e tutto ciò che stava nel mezzo: a ognuno riservavo lo stesso rude trattamento.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“I said I didn’t like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn’t possible to recreate life on the page without tricks.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Here were the luxury and priviledge of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes and progress for the rest. [He] owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted that all we had made was rotten, never thought to pose alternatives, never derived hope from friendship, love, free markets, industry, technology, trade, and all the arts and sciences.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“What I took to be the norm -- taut, smooth, supple -- was the transient special case of youth. To me, the old were a separate species, like sparrows or foxes.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“That evening he plays with the children, cleans the hamster's cage with them, gets them into their pyjamas, and reads to them three times over, once together, then to Jake on his own, then to Naomi. It is at times like these that his life makes sense. How soothing it is, the scent of clean bedlinen and minty toothpaste breath, and his children's eagerness to hear the adventures of imaginary beings, and how touching, to watch the children's eyes grow heavy as they struggle to hang on to the priceless last minutes of their day, and finally fail.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between - I gave them all the same rough treatment.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“He found and praised Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat. I said I found it too schematic and preferred The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. He nodded, but not in agreement, it seemed, more like a therapist who now understood my problem.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“He would change my life and behave with selfless cruelty as he prepared to set out on a journey with no hope of return.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

About the author

Popular quotes

“Uh—so would you like to go furniture shopping with me?” I scratched the back of my neck nervously and she narrowed her beautiful eyes at me. “No! I would not like to go furniture shopping with you, Kash. Did you already forget just telling me that you didn’t need anything from me?” “I—that was a misunderstanding. I thought you . . . that Mason . . . it doesn’t matter. Like I said, misunderstanding. If you don’t want to come with me, that’s fine. You can hang out here, but obviously, you’d just be sitting on the floor.” “What misunderstanding? What did you think was happening?” I groaned and grabbed the keys out of my pocket. “Forget it, Rachel.” “No, I deserve to know why you were so rude when I was offering to help you!” I flung my arm out to the side and practically growled at her, “I thought he sent you over here to fuck me, and I thought you agreed to it!” Instead of laughing at me, like I’d have expected any normal person to do, her stubborn expression fell, and all color drained from her face. Her mouth fell open and she quickly shut it, licking her lips as she forcibly swallowed. “I d-don’t want . . . I don’t want to have sex with you,” she whispered, and backed up until she hit the wall. “Okay, Rachel, that’s fine.” I spoke like I was talking to a scared victim. What was going on with her? “That’s good to know, I don’t want to have sex with you either, that’s why I was an asshole earlier.” That was a lie. I’d even freakin’ dreamed about this girl last night and woken with a painful hard-on I had to take care of in the shower, all the while Rachel flashing through my mind. And I’d lied to Mason earlier. Rachel wasn’t a bitch, though she’d definitely shown her bitchy side at our first meeting and before we got to the restaurant last night. But it didn’t take more than a handful of minutes watching her to realize it was her shield. It was her way of protecting herself. What she was hiding, I had no idea, and apparently it’d been obvious I was trying to figure it out last night. But there was something, and for some reason, I wanted to find out what it was and be whatever shield she needed. And that was dangerous. I”
― Molly McAdams, quote from Forgiving Lies

“It was Aristotle who said, 'In life, be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
― Nikki Sex, quote from Bound and Freed Boxed Set

“If you ask me to braid your hair. I'm going to stab you.”
― Francette Phal, quote from Flawed

“She wants to know why she can’t hear you,” Rue explains. “I told her your voice has been lost, so she’s keeping your hand until it comes back.”
― Josin L. McQuein, quote from Arclight

“The day each of us was born, we were given that energy—minute bits of electrochemical energy which feed small but important messages to our minds. One day, when the energy jar is empty, those thoughts, combined together, will have created in our lives the sum total of every worthwhile thing we have done.”
― quote from What to Say When You Talk to Yourself

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.