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.

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

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

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

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

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

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