Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my...

Solitude is the play field of Satan

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a...

Estamos absurdamente acostumados ao milagre de que uns poucos sinais escritos são capazes de conter imagens imortais, espirais de pensamentos, novos mundos com pessoas vivas que falam, choram e riem. Aceitamos isso com tanta simplicidade...

If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man’s logic and no man’s ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that...

And the rest is rust and stardust.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

Geniusz to brak przystosowania.

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is,...

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no...

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

Coordinating thereEvents and objects with remote eventsAnd vanished objects. Making ornamentsOf accidents and possibilities.

I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies – every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

… one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a...

Our imagination flies — we are its shadow on the earth.

…I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book….

I confess, I do not believe in time.

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

Other men die; but I Am not another; therefore I’ll not die

Ink, a Drug.

The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by...

Toward nightfall, Khrenov’s temperature had risen. The thermometer was warm, alive—the column of mercury climbed high on the little red ladder. For a long time he muttered unintelligibly, kept biting his lips and gently shaking...

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Il genio è un africano che vede in sogno la neve.

Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader’s heart.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer… I would rather not dwell upon him at all,...

We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls’ college where...

Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being — not a constant state — that any soul may be yours, if you...

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...