Alan Hollinghurst
The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.Collection: Writing
I was rather a goody-goody as a child... It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.Collection: Children
I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I'm glad of. It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.Collection: Children
...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.Collection: Kind
Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.Collection: Fantasy
He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.Collection: Unconditional Love
To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, 'vulgar and unsafe' --- that was the worst thing.Collection: Apologizing
she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.Collection: Book
What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.Collection: Technique
There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never hadCollection: People