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

- Alan Hollinghurst

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

- Alan Hollinghurst

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

- Alan Hollinghurst

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.

- Alan Hollinghurst

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

- Alan Hollinghurst

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

- Alan Hollinghurst

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

- Alan Hollinghurst

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

- Alan Hollinghurst

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 wa…

- Alan Hollinghurst