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...

and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped...

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and...

Good by-aye!” she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.

And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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