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.
The tiny madman in his padded cell.
All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
And what is death, if not a face at peace – its artistic perfection.
Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.
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.