Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
Memory overshadows the present and dims the future "into something thicker than its usual pea soup."
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.