I have never seen a more lucid, better balanced, mad mind than mine.
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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 boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him.
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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.
His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.
Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.
Measure me while I live – after it will be too late.
My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.
Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.