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

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

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

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.

...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

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