A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
I confess, I do not believe in time.
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
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.
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
The square root of I is I.
The lost glove is happy.
Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.
A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child’s scrawl on the fence, and the crank’s message in the market place. Art is never simple.
I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling.
I don’t read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
But in my arms she was always Lolita.
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.