There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
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.
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.
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.
For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is L. The suffix -ita has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita....
I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.
The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe 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...
Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a low suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dime...
A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.
A little downy girl still wearing poppiesstill eating popcorn in the colored gloamwhere tawny Indians took paid croppersbecause you stole herfrom her wax-browed and dignified protectorspitting into hi...
I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet f...
He suggested I play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, would really work; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one en...
He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite pi...
As far back as I can remember myself—and I remember myself with lawless lucidity, I have been my own accomplice, who knows too much, and therefore is dangerous.
Coordinating thereEvents and objects with remote eventsAnd vanished objects. Making ornamentsOf accidents and possibilities.
Nothing is more occult than the way letters, under the auspices of unimaginable carriers, circulate through the weird mess of civil wars; but whenever, owing to that mess, there was some break in our...
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