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.
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...
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...
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.
One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than he ever knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written...
The need to fear such things was ended
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...
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...
Writers really don't retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot.
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...
You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?
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...
Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they're ready to leave
What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
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...
One should not believe too easily in a life which can easily vanish.