Top 40 Alan Hollinghurst Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

2. “He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

3. “To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, ‘vulgar and unsafe’ – that was the worst thing.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

4. “There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

5. “I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst

8. “He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst

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

— Alan Hollinghurst

11. “And going into the showers I saw a suntanned young lad in pale blue trunks that I rather liked the look of.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

12. “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.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

13. “He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired. It would live up to its fame. But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

14. “He knew he was giving off the mischievous contentment of someone left behind for an afternoon, sleepy hints that he might have got up to something but in fact had done the more enviable and inexplicable nothing.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

15. “He was an animal, that great thing for someone else to be.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

16. “Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

17. “He saw that first love had come with a bundle of other firsts, which he took hold of like a wonderful but worrying bouquet.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

18. “Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

19. “He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

20. “My months in the Scrubs were a kind of desert in time: beyond their strict and ascetic routines they were featureless, and it is hard in retrospect to know what one did on any day or even in any month. I had had, of course, some experience of deserts, even a taste for them, and knew how to fall back, like a camel on its fat, on an inner reserve of fantasy and contemplation.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

21. “Nick’s hesitation was only the twitch of wariness he felt at any prospect of happiness.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

22. “It was a refinement of teasing, where you were never told why your answer was wrong.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

23. “When Senta started singing it was spellbinding – Daphne said this word to herself with a further shiver of pleasure.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

24. “Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

25. “The seat I had taken was marked for the use of the elderly and handicapped, but had another claimant come, a figure like Charles, for instance, I would have been prepared to leave the train, when my stop came, with a lurching gait or limb held awry to designate my previously unguessed incapacity.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

26. “As often with older people he was both bored and unaccountably involved at the same time.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

27. “She didn’t know what Senta was saying, beyond the recurrent sounding of the word Mann, but she sensed the presence of passionate love, and felt the air of legend, which had a natural hold on her.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

28. “It had come down in the storms several winters ago and he had watched it sink over time on the shattered branches beneath it, like a great gnarled monster protractedly lying down, bedding down in its own rot and wreckage.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

29. “Then he stood up straight, sprang the catches, and released the heady and authentic gentleman’s smell: toilet water, starch, and the slowly fading reek of leather.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

30. “It’s always his big day these days. He hardly has a small one.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

31. “It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived – we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

32. “I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

33. “A shared passion for a subject, large or small, could quickly put two strangers into a special state of subdued rapture and rivalry, distantly resembling love; but you had to hit on the subject.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

34. “The birdsong was so loud that after it had woken you it drove you back to sleep.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

35. “Each person if he was lucky found the place where he could shine, and the person he could shine on. At Cranley Gardens Johnny had been audience, to Evert, to Ivan, to the whole clever, memoir-swapping gang. But with Pat he was a closely attended performer – he was funny, almost articulate, and rich in things worth saying.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

36. “The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

37. “The deep connection between them was so secret that at times it was hard to believe it existed.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

38. “Peter was that magic person we all meet, if we’re lucky, who shows us how to live our lives, and be ourselves.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

39. “I thought, these are the evening routines which will soon be mine, the tug of an unknown suburb, or a bar, or a lover.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

40. “There is a thumping silence, and the light of the one lamp across the wet tiled floor seems conscious that it will illuminate this and many other atrocities, just as it will go on shining through days and months of sudden speechless lusts, and all the intervening hours of silent emptiness.”

— Alan Hollinghurst