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

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.

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

The trouble is not that players have sex the night before a game. It’s that they stay out all night looking for it.

Ability is the art of getting credit for all the home runs somebody else hits.

Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

Jonathan is that brilliant little fire that burns within us all, that lives only for those moments when we reach perfection.

Jewelry, to me, is a pain in the derriere, because you have to be watching it all the time.

When I’m stylizing, it’s all about accessories.

There’s a way that you can throw negativity out there that seems rebellious. But I’ve always taken pleasure in a different kind of rebellion, which is putting a positive spin on everything, trying to enjoy myself at all times.

We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power..