I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with.
I don’t belong to any club or group. I don’t fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.
Memory overshadows the present and dims the future “into something thicker than its usual pea soup.”
Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
A good laugh is the best pesticide.
Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.
Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.
The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
All great novels are great fairy tales.
A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.