Alan Hollinghurst Quotes & Sayings

Simply having opposition brought latent feelings to the surface and polarized views he might otherwise hardly have bothered to formulate. It became
urgent for him to revile Richard Strauss, and he did it happily but a little hysterically, as if far
more than questions of taste were involved. — 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 was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do. — Alan Hollinghurst

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

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive. — 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 his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice. — Alan Hollinghurst

All families are silly in their own way. — Alan Hollinghurst

Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening. — Alan Hollinghurst

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. — Alan Hollinghurst

And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it. — Alan Hollinghurst

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

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. — Alan Hollinghurst

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

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

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

The seat I had taken was marked for the use of the elderly and handicapped, but had another claimant come, a figure like Charles, for instance, I would have been prepared to leave the train, when my stop came, with a lurching gait or limb held awry to designate my previously unguessed incapacity. — 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

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. — Alan Hollinghurst

He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired. It would live up to its fame. But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds. — 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

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined. — 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 can't bear the smell of cigars, can you?" said Lady Partridge.
"Lionel hates it too," murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men's tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows. — Alan Hollinghurst

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. — Alan Hollinghurst

Paul was blandness itself, just tinged with pink. — Alan Hollinghurst

The pursuit of love seemed to need the cultivation of indifference. — Alan Hollinghurst

There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism — Alan Hollinghurst

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

He was an animal, that great thing for someone else to be. — 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. — Alan Hollinghurst

You can drive, Nick,' and threw them over to him. It was typical of Wani to dress up a command
as a treat. — Alan Hollinghurst

All his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for. — Alan Hollinghurst

...like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light. — Alan Hollinghurst

There are chaps who don't care for them, you know. Simply can't abide them. Can't stand the sight of them, their titties and their big sit-upons, — 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 which, being temporary, is a kind of pleasure. — Alan Hollinghurst

Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers. — Alan Hollinghurst