But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.
I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers - not all of them, of course.
They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortable. 'It wouldn't work. It's the attraction of opposites,' he said.
It's great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is e...
You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undenia...
She formed her life day by day, taking as its materials the emptiness and panic as well as the rushes, like fever, of contentment. I am beyond fear of solitude, she thought, I am past it. The idea thr...
The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river wate...
I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someo...
You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
Certains visages vous subjuguent, on s'en détourne avec le sentiment de renoncer même à respirer. Demain, j'aurai oublié tout ça, se dit-il. Le matin, tout est différent, les choses deviennent réelles...
You must go further than I did, Nedra said. You know that.Further?With your life. You must become free.She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in her case th...
Writers really don't retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot.
How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?
They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortable. 'It wouldn't work. It's the attraction of opposites,' he said.We're not opposites.'I don't mean...
He knew all the constellations. He had seen them rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts.
Mentre sedevano vicini o mangiavano o camminavano, lui condivideva liberamente con lei i suoi pensieri e le sue idee sulla vita, la storia, l’arte. Le parlava di ogni cosa. Sapeva che lei non si inter...
It’s ahead of us. All I can tell you is, not even courage will help. Are you reading Alma Mahler again? No. Her voice was even and knowing. The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the wa...
Jivan: You think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has it. It's not true. It's very hard to find.Nedra: I haven't been looking for it.Jivan: It's like a tree...It takes a lon...
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