To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can...
They come and go, without the drowsy observer’s participation, but are essentially different from dream pictures for he is still master of his senses. They are often grotesque. I am pestered by roguis...
There was a time in my demented youthWhen somehow I suspected that the truthAbout survival after death was knownTo every human being: I aloneKnew nothing, and a great conspiracyOf books and people hid...
There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.
There can be no emblem or parable in a village idiot's hallucinations or in last night's dream of any of us in this hall. In those random visions nothing – underline nothing (grating sound of horizont...
Then, after all the excitement, I shall experience a certain satiation of suffering--perhaps on the mountain pass to a kind of happiness which it is too early for me to know (I know only that when I r...
The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all la...
The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay...
The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that offensive is frequently but a synonym for unusual; and a great work of art is of course alw...
Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun.
Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later whe...
Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.
Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov’s round of weird visits in Gogol’s Dead Souls.
Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.
So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the...
Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average reality perceived by the communal eye.
Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a little quiz—-ten definitions of a reader, and from these ten the students...
One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its popula...
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and...