…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.
ALAN HOLLINGHURST…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTTo apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, ‘vulgar and unsafe’ — that was the worst thing.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTI like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTIt 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.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTThe great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTThere 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
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTI 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.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTI think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I’m glad of.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTThe worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTWhat the problem was was this colossal redundancy.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTshe kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTThe squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTNow that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.
ALAN HOLLINGHURSTHe wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.
ALAN HOLLINGHURST