Ian McEwan - Sweet Tooth (2012)

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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
What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

Ian McEwan
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.

Ian McEwan
How can one understand the inner life of a character, real or fictional, without knowing the state of her finances?

Ian McEwan
And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

Ian McEwan
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
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
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
Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.

Ian McEwan
Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

Ian McEwan