“He slid forward in his chair, head thrown back, boots straight out across the hearthrug. Evert knew already how David took drink, and noted the way he mugged being drunker than he was. He saw for three seconds David was showing him a thing beyond speech, and looked away and back again in hot-faced excitement. Then David dropped his hand and covered himself loosely, as if Evert were indeed a pervert to peep at a man’s lap.”
Alan Hollinghurst – The Sparsholt Affair (2017)
“I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.”
– Novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) speaking to American author Michael Mewshaw in 1972.
“Strangely, his name was Jean, which he pronounced as the French do, and although just turned 17, he had already read Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, and believed he was reincarnated from someone who died of an o.d. in 1979 at Studio 54. He knew way too much about that infamous club, and about infamy in general.”
The ‘bicycle thief’ of Manhattan’s West 14th Street Pier/
Fred H. Berger/Propaganda Magazine/Winter 1999
I see something written by somebody else, and like it. But I will forget the words, and they will be gone. I shall put them here. When I am old, and remember nothing, I will know that they didn’t get lost.
“When one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie? What does one do, seeing the lustful, disrespectful world going about its business, the young up one another’s arse? Was there ever an end to it, this irresistible, normal, subnormal craving for sex? Or did it go tauntingly on?”
Alan Hollinghurst/The Swimming Pool Library
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 