For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, pinging pebbles at an empty can.
And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference betweenTwo methods of composing: , the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while heIs...
I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.
I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.
The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible
Your voice, through the beelike hum, was remote and anxious. It kept sliding into the distance and vanishing. I spoke to you with tightly shut eyes, and felt like crying. My love for you was the throb...
Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads...
The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.
Humbert Humbert: You know, I've missed you terribly. Lolita Haze: I haven't missed you. In fact, I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you. Humbert Humbert: Oh? Lolita Haze: But it doesn't matter a bit,...
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
[...] and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things.
All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.
The cup-sized breasts of that twenty-four year old impatient beauty seemed a dozen years younger than she, with those pale squinty nipples and firm form.
A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an inti...
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it fo...
There are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick calves and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe, the coffin of coarse female flesh within which...