Best 25 quotes of Alan Hollinghurst on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when it comes to adaptation.

Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been.

Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour' 'Well, it's bloody close...' 'Well, they often are....

Each person if he was lucky found the place where he could shine, and the person he could shine on. At Cranley Gardens Johnny had been audience, to Evert, to Ivan, to the whole clever, memoir-swapping gang. But with Pat he was a closely attended performer - he was funny, almost articulate, and rich in things worth saying.

He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories.

I haunted and interrogated the past even as it interrogated me. London, Skinner's Lane, Brook Street, the Sudan - how had we passed all that time? Why did we not burn up every moment of it, as we would if we could have it all again? The journey back to England surfaced in dreams and occupied my days, the train to Wadi Halfa panting across the desert, reading old newspapers in the white, shuttered carriages while Taha, alas, was obliged to travel with the guard; and the stops, which had no names, but only a number, painted on a little shelter beside the track; and the steamer to the first Cateract and the visionary beauty of Aswan.

I'm not sure what form I expected the threat to take; a police car actually stopping outside, a powerfully built black man darting up the drive? I had several dreams of siege, in which the house became a frail slatted box, shadowy and exquisite within, the walls all cracked and bleached louvres which fell to powder as one brushed against them. In one dream Arthur and I were there, and others, old school friends, a gaggle of black kids from the Shaft, my grandfather tearful and hopeless. We knew we had no chance of surviving the violence that surrounded us, closing in fast, and I was gripped by a nauseating terror. I woke up in the certain knowledge that I was about to die: the bedsprings were ticking from the sprinting vehemence of my heartbeat. I didn't dare go back to sleep and after a while sat up and read, while Arthur slept deeply beside me. It took days to lose the mood of the dream, and its power to prickle my scalp. The neighbourhood seemed eerily impregnated with it, and its passing made possible a new confidence, as if a sentence had been lifted.

Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He shows his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. It wasn't something learnt, I suspected, from the guys before me who'd picked him up and fucked him and fucked him around. It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him. It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go.

Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned around from time to time to conceal or display, barely exchanging looks as they resolved. The old men took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcing-house of the shower. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine.

On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going - not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down.

Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk.

Peter was that magic person we all meet, if we’re lucky, who shows us how to live our lives, and be ourselves.

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art—she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the street outside—a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.

She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.

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

There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism

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