Quotes from 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.

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

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

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.

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.

He saw that first love had come with a bundle of other firsts, which he took hold of like a wonderful but worrying bouquet.

the music expressed life and explained it and left you having to ask again.

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.

He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out.

Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk.

But of course he had never done more than hug Toby and kiss him on the cheek; he had twice had a peep at his penis at a college urinal. Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden, he was talking to the mother of the man who called him not only a 'damn good fuck' but also a 'hot little cocksucker' with 'a first-class degree in arse-licking'. Which clearly was way beyond hugging and peeping. Nick gazed at her in a trance of revelation and gratitude. And

The birdsong was so loud that after it had woken you it drove you back to sleep.

Peter was that magic person we all meet, if we're lucky, who shows us how to live our lives, and be ourselves.

It was a refinement of teasing, where you were never told why your answer was wrong.

older vowels were showing through as he said that it was "awfully good of" his parents to have tolerated him.

A shared passion for a subject, large or small, could quickly put two strangers into a special state of subdued rapture and rivalry, distantly resembling love; but you had to hit on the subject.

As often with older people he was both bored and unaccountably involved at the same time.

When one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie? What does one do, seeing the lustful, disrespectful world going about its business, the young up one another's arse? Was there ever an end to it, this irresistible, normal, subnormal craving for sex? Or did it go tauntingly on?

Then he stood up straight, sprang the catches, and released the heady and authentic gentleman's smell: toilet water, starch, and the slowly fading reek of leather.

Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when it comes to adaptation.

I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides.

The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing

My months in the Scrubs were a kind of desert in time: beyond their strict and ascetic routines they were featureless, and it is hard in retrospect to know what one did on any day or even in any month. I had had, of course, some experience of deserts, even a taste for them, and knew how to fall back, like a camel on its fat, on an inner reserve of fantasy and contemplation.

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