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.

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

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

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

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.

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