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 More Quotes by Alan Hollinghurst More Quotes From Alan Hollinghurst The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other. Alan Hollinghurst I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive. 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 tempo great-wisdom writing Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined. Alan Hollinghurst fantasy made He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love. Alan Hollinghurst unconditional-love wanted compliment To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, 'vulgar and unsafe' --- that was the worst thing. Alan Hollinghurst apologizing worst boring 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 Alan Hollinghurst noise feelings people she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face. Alan Hollinghurst half faces book What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material. Alan Hollinghurst brilliant technique problem 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. Alan Hollinghurst writing book children ...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for. Alan Hollinghurst disdain longing kind