31 Quotes by Alan Hollinghurst

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.

And going into the showers I saw a suntanned young lad in pale blue trunks that I rather liked the look of.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

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

He knew he was giving off the mischievous contentment of someone left behind for an afternoon, sleepy hints that he might have got up to something but in fact had done the more enviable and inexplicable nothing.

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

Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions.

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.