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

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.

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

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.

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

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