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

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.

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.

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

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.

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