Alan Hollinghurst quotes:

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.

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.

Simply having opposition brought latent feelings to the surface and polarized views he might otherwise hardly have bothered to formulate. It became urgent for him to revile Richard Strauss, and he did it happily but a little hysterically, as if far more than questions of taste were involved.

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.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, ...

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

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

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

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

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

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

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