A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.
In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth ... and wondering with an immortal Alice at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matte...
I dreamt of you last night - as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.
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.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you hav...
Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought — and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall...
Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.
There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is not really mine, it belongs to strangers, to all men; it is soaked through by the evil-smelling efflu...
There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty
The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls' college where I t...
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality - the deception was bearable.
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it.