Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they...

Aurora, you’re a child, live like one, don’t act like one. Enjoy the innocence, dump the immaturity.

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,...

History, lie of our lives, mire of our loins. Our sins, our souls. Hiss-tih-ree: the tip of the pen taking a trip of three steps (with one glide) down the chronicle to trap a slick,...

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible...

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

And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita . . .” What other immortality will anyone share?

Even in death, her mother was winning.

They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on...

I saw the last piece of innocence unfurl inside of her.-Nick Plato (from the story Platonick)

We all have such fateful objects — it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another — carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here...

I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you’ve done to me.

If you can get to be you, why can’t I get to be me?

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

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.

How do you circumvent a mind bent upon lying to get away from the truth?

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...

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

I ask you, what would you do if you could erase one bad memory and retain all that was beautiful in your life? Would you not move heaven and earth – and get loads of...

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

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.

What I’ve always taken away from his words is the sense that we all have something that confines us, that seeks to define us, label us, belittling us in the process, shortchanging our potential. Can...

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,...

He wrote to his father every day. His platoon called his dad a girlfriend.

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy

The list of lifesavers left him numb, clueless – the action, indifferent.

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.

He also knew the language of The Klingons, but the army had no use for it.

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...