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

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

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

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

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

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

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