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.

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

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

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

...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.

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