Hollinghurst Quotes

#1. I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.

Stacey D'Erasmo

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

Alan Hollinghurst

#3. 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

#4. '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

#5. 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

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

Alan Hollinghurst

#7. 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

#8. Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.

Alan Hollinghurst

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Alan Hollinghurst

#14. Paul was blandness itself, just tinged with pink.

Alan Hollinghurst

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

Alan Hollinghurst

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

Alan Hollinghurst

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Alan Hollinghurst

#20. 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

#21. ...like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light.

Alan Hollinghurst

#22. All his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

Alan Hollinghurst

#23. I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

Alan Hollinghurst

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

Alan Hollinghurst

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

Alan Hollinghurst

#26. The pursuit of love seemed to need the cultivation of indifference.

Alan Hollinghurst

#27. 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

#28. He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories.

Alan Hollinghurst

#29. 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

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

Alan Hollinghurst

#31. All families are silly in their own way.

Alan Hollinghurst

#32. 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

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

Alan Hollinghurst

#34. There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism

Alan Hollinghurst

#35. Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening.

Alan Hollinghurst