“He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.”

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.

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.

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

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 had

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy.

The squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.

I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I’m glad of.

To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, ‘vulgar and unsafe’ — that was the worst thing.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

Welcome the compliments, you deserve them more than you believe.

It’s great when talented people in the world, in the same business, can see your work and compliment you on what you’re doing and take a strong interest in your movements in your career.

The best compliment was Ben Kingsley coming up to me, putting his hand on the back of my neck, and saying, “Good job, son.”.

A lobster bisque ought to be the crowning glory of the potager. And this one was excellent. Silky as a gigolo’s compliment and fishy as a chancellor’s promise.

I always wanted to be more than my brown skin, when you told me I was sweet like cinnamon.

Whether you are doing it in the bar, the church, the strip joint, or the Himalayas, the first duty of music is to complement and enhance life.

And if people come up and say they like the movies you’re in, it’s a great compliment.

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure – that is all that agnosticism means.