Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst

“And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only…

— Alan Hollinghurst

“Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live…

— Alan Hollinghurst

“...but he felt the relief of being alone as well...the forgotten solitude which measures and verifies the strength of an affair, and…

— Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst

“She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that…

— Alan Hollinghurst

“After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a…

— 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

“The pursuit of love seemed to need the cultivation of indifference.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst

“Paul was blandness itself, just tinged with pink.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

“It was the time of year when the atmosphere streamed with unexpected hints and memories, and a paradoxical sense of renewal.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

“Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across…

— Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

— Alan Hollinghurst

“On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going - not a mad boo-hoo but wailing…

— Alan Hollinghurst

“All families are silly in their own way.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings…

— Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst

“He somehow saw that to her being drunk had its whole long sentimental history, whereas to him it was a freakish novelty.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

“ 'Can't really say?' Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how…

— Alan Hollinghurst

“Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

“He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its…

— Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst