-
All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.
-
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.
-
Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
-
I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
-
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
-
Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
-
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
-
My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
-
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
-
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
-
One is always at home in one's past.
-
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
-
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
-
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
-
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
-
Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
-
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
-
There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
-
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
-
I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
-
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
-
As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.
-
Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.
-
All great novels are great fairy tales.