Alan Hollinghurst

I can__ bear the smell of cigars, can you?_ said Lady Partridge. __ionel hates it too,_ murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men__ tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows.

She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.

On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going - not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down.

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

After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. __hat have you found there?_ said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. __h, you__e a Trollope man, are you?_ ____ not sure I am, really,_ said Nick. __ always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his __reat heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters_?_ Lord Kessler paid a moment__ wry respect to this bit of showing off, but said, __h, Trollope__ good. He__ very good on money._ __h_yes_ said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. __o be honest, there__ a lot of him I haven__ yet read._ __o, this one is pretty good,_ Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage.

There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism

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

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she__ read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art__he could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent__ Park, rain in the street outside__ little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.

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

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

Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned around from time to time to conceal or display, barely exchanging looks as they resolved. The old men took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcing-house of the shower. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine.

Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when it comes to adaptation.

Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour''Well, it's bloody close...''Well, they often are....

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

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