“I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.”

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.

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.

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

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

Cause people lose it, they lose it – they say: ‘I like that, and that’s not this.’

I love to cook a meal for the so-called holidays. You always need the turkey. I like making a good BBQ brisket as well.

I knew I was destined to be a rock star. I just knew it, like I’ve always had the power of foresight.

Life gets so ridiculous, you just have to brush it off like sand and laugh. I think the laughter is good medicine for crap-itis.

I like every girl. Every kind of girl that there is, I like.

Art is not the spiritual side of business.

I just do whatever I do, and put it out there without tryin to cater to anybody. If you like it, you like it.

Lamb is such a beautiful thing.