It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

Of the not very many ways known of shedding one’s body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound...

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he would say “Prenez donc une des ces poires. La...

Life is a great surprise. I don’t see why death should not be an even greater one.

We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle…

The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth.

there were not many readers around in summer.” I was there, a one-man multitude.

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.

Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight.”It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability – a most singular case, I presume – of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest.

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the first – a dull man writing broken English, the second – a broken man writing dull English.

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author’s supervision swell gradually with the reader’s lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that – not very appetizing – food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties...

Who grins in official circumstances?

Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

Je découvris qu’en bluffant les psychiatres on pouvait tirer des trésors inépuisables de divertissement gratifiants: vous les menez habilement en bateau, leur cachez soigneusement que vous connaissez toutes les ficelles du métier; vous inventez à leur intention des rêves élaborés, de purs classiques du genre qui provoquent chez eux, ces extorqueurs de rêves, de tels...

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes

I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.

I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.

And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed...

Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.

It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to do me a refined aesthetic favor, had touched my sleeve and said, “I want you to meet-” and led me to Nina, who sat in the corner of a couch, her body folded Z-wise, with an...

Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .

Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed — then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the...

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues....

But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book so that his very absence becomes a kind of radiant presence. As the French say, il brille par son absence — “he shines by his absence.” In connection with Bleak House we are concerned with one of those...

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

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 art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference betweenTwo methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while heIs soaping a third time one leg, and B,The other kind, much more decorous, whenHe’s in his study writing with a pen. In method...

Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still...

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

There is only one school of literature – that of talent.

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle...

I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Dear Jesus, do something.

Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

The lost glove is happy.

The tiny madman in his padded cell.

I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved...