All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.

The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman’s effort.

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in...

A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.

As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky he realized with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever. It had lasted no more than four days—four days which...

He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing...

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look...

I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. […] Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone...

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his...

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed...

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone...

The square root of I is I.

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where...

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the...

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so as to be overheard by anyone who might be listening, that they were contemplating moving, when all at once...

For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, “pinging” pebbles at an empty can.

In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does...

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed...

A thousand years ago five minutes wereEqual to forty ounces of fine sand.Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime andInfinite aftertime: above your headThey close like giant wings, and you are dead.

Non può esservi alcuna sottomissione – perché il fatto stesso che parliamo di questi argomenti indica che vi è curiosità, e la curiosità è insubordinazione nella forma più pura.

(T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.

Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution...

a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s...

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with

On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen...

Light in comparison with darkness is a void.

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one’s reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?

We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled...

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

I notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but...

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something… something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms — some...

One last word,’ I said in my horrible careful English, ‘are you quite, quite sure that—well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but—well—some day, any day, you will not come to live with...