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

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

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.

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

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

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