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Literature, Real Literature, Must Not Be Gulped Down Like Some Potion Which May Be Good For The Heart Or Good For The Brain—the Brain, That Stomach Of The Soul. Literature Must Be Taken And Broken To Bits, Pulled Apart, Squashed—then Its Lovely Reek Will Be Smelt In The Hollow Of The Palm, It Will Be Munched And Rolled Upon The Tongue With Relish; Then, And Only Then, Its Rare Flavor Will Be Appreciated At Its True Worth And The Broken And Crushed Parts Will Again Come Together In Your Mind And Disclose The Beauty Of A Unity To Which You Have Contributed Something Of Your Own Blood.

-Vladimir Nabokov

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Literature, Real Literature, Must

Vladimir Nabokov

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Literature, Real Literature, Must Not Be Gulped Down Like Some Potion Which May Be Good For The Heart Or Good For The Brain—the Brain, That Stomach Of The Soul. Literature Must Be Taken And Broken To Bits, Pulled Apart, Squashed—then Its Lovely Reek Will Be Smelt In The Hollow Of The Palm, It Will Be Munched And Rolled Upon The Tongue With Relish; Then, And Only Then, Its Rare Flavor Will Be Appreciated At Its True Worth And The Broken And Crushed Parts Will Again Come Together In Your Mind And Disclose The Beauty Of A Unity To Which You Have Contributed Something Of Your Own Blood.

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I Do Not See Any Essential Difference Between Abstract And Primitive Art. Both Are Simple And Sincere. Naturally, We Should Not Generalize In These Matters: It Is The Individual Artist That Counts.

Down You Go, But All The While You Feel Suspended And Buoyed As You Somersault In Slow Motion Like A Somnolent Tumbler Pigeon, And Sprawl Supine On The Eiderdown Of The Air, Or Lazily Turn To Embrace Your Pillow, Enjoying Every Last Instant Of Soft, Deep, Death-padded Life, With The Earth's Green See-saw Now Above, Now Below, And The Voluptuous Crucifixion, As You Stretch Yourself In The Growing Rush, In The Nearing Swish, And Then Your Loved Body's Obliteration In The Lap Of The Lord.

Between The Age Limits Of Nine And Fourteen There Occur Maidens Who, To Certain Bewitched Travelers, Twice Or Many Times Older Than They, Reveal Their True Nature Which Is Not Human, But Nymphic (that Is, Demoniac); And These Chosen Creatures I Propose To Designate As Nymphets.

Pnin Slowly Walked Under Solemn Pines. The Sky Was Dying. He Did Not Believe In An Autocratic God. He Did Believe, Dimly, In A Democracy Of Ghosts. The Souls Of The Dead, Perhaps, Formed Committees, And These, In Continuous Session, Attended The Destinies Of The Quick.

A Person Hoping To Become A Poet Must Have The Capacity Of Thinking Of Several Things At A Time.

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.

Only Talent Interests Me In Paintings And Books. Not General Ideas, But The Individual Contribution.

I Think Like A Genius, I Write Like A Distinguished Author, And I Speak Like A Child.

Man Exists Only Insofar As He Is Separated From His Surroundings. The Cranium Is A Space-traveler's Helmet. Stay Inside Or You Perish.

Dostoevky's Lack Of Taste, His Monotonous Dealings With Persons Suffering With Pre-freudian Complexes, The Way He Has Of Wallowing In The Tragic Misadventures Of Human Dignity - All This Is Difficult To Admire.

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 From Long Ago - But I Loved Her, This Lolita, Pale And Polluted And Big With Another Man's Child. She Could Fade And Wither - I Didn't Care. I Would Still Go Mad With Tenderness At The Mere Sight Of Her Face.

If Possible, Be Russian. And Live In Another Country. Play Chess. Be An Active Trader Between Languages. Carry Precious Metals From One To The Other. Remind Us Of Stravinsky. Know The Names Of Plants And Flying Creatures. Hunt Gauzy Wings With Snares Of Gauze. Make Science Pay Tribute. Have A Butterfly Known By Your Name.

To Know That No One Before You Has Seen An Organ You Are Examining, To Trace Relationships That Have Occurred To No One Before, To Immerse Yourself In The Wondrous Crystalline World Of The Microscope, Where Silence Reigns, Circumscribed By Its Own Horizon, A Blindingly White Arena - All This Is So Enticing That I Cannot Describe It.

Who Can Say What Heartbreaks Are Caused In A Dog By Our Discontinuing A Romp?

Treading The Soil Of The Moon, Palpating Its Pebbles, Tasting The Panic And Splendor Of The Event, Feeling In The Pit Of One's Stomach The Separation From Terra-these Form The Most Romantic Sensation An Explorer Has Ever Known . . . This Is The Only Thing I Can Say About The Matter. The Utilitarian Results Do Not Interest Me.

A Creative Writer Must Study Carefully The Works Of His Rivals, Including The Almighty. He Must Possess The Inborn Capacity Not Only Of Recombining But Of Re-creating The Given World. In Order To Do This Adequately, Avoiding Duplication Of Labor, The Artist Should Know The Given World.

In Reading, One Should Notice And Fondle Details.

A Writer Should Have The Precision Of A Poet And The Imagination Of A Scientist.

Maybe The Only Thing That Hints At A Sense Of Time Is Rhythm; Not The Recurrent Beats Of The Rhythm But The Gap Between Two Such Beats, The Gray Gap Between Black Beats: The Tender Interval.

I Am Surrounded By Some Sort Of Wretched Specters, Not By People. They Torment Me As Can Torment Only Senseless Visions, Bad Dreams, Dregs Of Delirium, The Drivel Of Nightmares And Everything That Passes Down Here For Real Life.

Toska - Noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian Word Roughly Translated As Sadness, Melancholia, Lugubriousness. "no Single Word In English Renders All The Shades Of Toska. At Its Deepest And Most Painful, It Is A Sensation Of Great Spiritual Anguish, Often Without Any Specific Cause. At Less Morbid Levels It Is A Dull Ache Of The Soul, A Longing With Nothing To Long For, A Sick Pining, A Vague Restlessness, Mental Throes, Yearning. In Particular Cases It May Be The Desire For Somebody Of Something Specific, Nostalgia, Love-sickness. At The Lowest Level It Grades Into Ennui, Boredom.

There Are Gentle Souls Who Would Pronounce Lolita Meaningless Because It Does Not Teach Them Anything. I Am Neither A Reader Nor A Writer Of Didactic Fiction...for Me A Work Of Fiction Exists Only Insofar As It Affords Me What I Shall Bluntly Call Aesthetic Bliss, That Is A Sense Of Being Somehow, Somewhere, Connected With Other States Of Being Where Art (curiosity, Tenderness, Kindness, Ecstasy) Is The Norm.

Neither In Environment Nor In Heredity Can I Find The Exact Instrument That Fashioned Me, The A.non.y.muse Roller That Passed Upon My Life A Certain Intricate Watermark Whose Unique Design Becomes Visible When The Lamp Of Art Is Made To Shine Through Life's Foolscap.

A Thousand Years Ago Five Minutes Were Equal To Forty Ounces Of Fine Sand. Outstare The Stars. Infinite Foretime And Infinite Aftertime: Above Your Head They Close Like Giant Wings, And You Are Dead.

My Private Tragedy, Which Cannot, And Indeed Should Not, Be Anybody's Concern, Is That I Had To Abandon My Natural Idiom, My Untrammeled, Rich, And Infinitely Docile Russian Tongue For A Second-rate Brand Of English, Devoid Of Any Of Those Apparatuses–the Baffling Mirror, The Black Velvet Backdrop, The Implied Associations And Traditions–which The Native Illusionist, Frac-tails Flying, Can Magically Use To Transcend The Heritage In His Own Way.

Long After Her Death I Felt Her Thoughts Floating Through Mine. Long Before We Met We Had Had The Same Dreams. We Compared Notes. We Found Strange Affinities. The Same June Of The Same Year (1919) A Stray Canary Had Fluttered Into Her House And Mine, In Two Widely Separated Countries. Oh, Lolita, Had You Love Me Thus!

While The Scientist Sees Everything That Happens In One Point Of Space, The Poet Feels Everything That Happens In One Point Of Time.

Nostalgia In Reverse, The Longing For Yet Another Strange Land, Grew Especially Strong In Spring.

I Need You, The Reader, To Imagine Us, For We Don't Really Exist If You Don't.

All At Once We Were Madly, Clumsily, Shamelessly, Agonizingly In Love With Each Other; Hopelessly, I Should Add, Because That Frenzy Of Mutual Possession Might Have Been Assuaged Only By Our Actually Imbibing And Assimilating Every Particle Of Each Other's Soul And Flesh; But There We Were, Unable Even To Mate As Slum Children Would Have So Easily Found An Opportunity To Do So.

Perhaps, Somewhere, Some Day, At A Less Miserable Time, We May See Each Other Again.

We Think Not In Words But In Shadows Of Words.

Genius Is An African Who Dreams Up Snow.

Adultery Is A Most Conventional Way To Rise Above The Conventional.

…she Was, Obviously, One Of Those Women Whose Polished Words May Reflect A Book Club Or Bridge Club, Or Any Other Deadly Conventionality, But Never Her Soul.

Imagination Without Knowledge Leads No Farther Than The Back Yard Of Primitive Art, The Child's Scrawl On The Fence, And The Crank's Message In The Market Place. Art Is Never Simple.

As Far As I Can Recall, The Initial Shiver Of Inspiration [for Lolita] Was Somehow Prompted By A Newspaper Story About An Ape In The Jardin Des Plantes, Who, After Months Of Coaxing By A Scientist, Produced The First Drawing Ever Charcoaled By An Animal: This Sketch Showed The Bars Of The Poor Creature's Cage.

I Was The Shadow Of The Waxwing Slain/by The False Azure In The Windowpane.

By God, I Could Make Myself Bring Her That Economically Halved Grapefruit, That Sugarless Breakfast.

I Knew I Had Fallen In Love With Lolita Forever; But I Also Knew She Would Not Be Forever Lolita.

My God Died Young. Theolatry I Found Degrading, And Its Premises, Unsound. No Free Man Needs God; But Was I Free?

I Was Weeping Again, Drunk On The Impossible Past.

All My Stories Are Webs Of Style And None Seems At First Blush To Contain Much Kinetic Matter.

Freudism And All It Has Tainted With Its Grotesque Implications And Methods, Appear To Me To Be One Of The Vilest Deceits Practiced By People On Themselves And On Others. I Reject It Utterly, Along With A Few Other Medieval Items Still Adored By The Ignorant, The Conventional, Or The Very Sick.

Beauty Plus Pity -- That Is The Closest We Can Get To A Definition Of Art.

There Is Nothing More Atrociously Cruel Than An Adored Child.

My Answer To Your Question'does The Writer Have A Social Responsibility?' Is No.you Owe Me Ten Cents, Sir.

My Loathings Are Simple. Stupidity, Oppression, Crime, Cruelty, Soft Music. My Pleasures Are The Most Intense Known To Man: Writing And Butterfly Hunting.

Measure Me While I Live - After It Will Be Too Late.

The Term "bend Sinister" Means A Heraldic Bar Or Band Drawn From The Left Side (and Popularly, But Incorrectly, Supposed To Denote Bastardy). This Choice Of Title Was An Attempt To Suggest An Outline Broken By Refraction, A Distortion In The Mirror Of Being, A Wrong Turn Taken By Life, A Sinistral And Sinister World. The Title's Drawback Is That A Solemn Reader Looking For "general Ideas" Or "human Interest" (which Is Much The Same Thing) In A Novel May Be Led To Look For Them In This One.

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 Laws Of Humanity, I Might As Well Disregard The Rules Of Traffic. So I Crossed To The Left Side Of The Highway And Checked The Feeling, And The Feeling Was Good. It Was A Pleasant Diaphragmal Melting, With Elements Of Diffused Tactility, All This Enhanced By The Thought That Nothing Could Be Nearer To The Elimination Of Basic Physical Laws Than Deliberately Driving On The Wrong Site Of The Road.

But That Mimosa Grove - The Haze Of Stars, The Tingle, The Flame, The Honey-dew, And The Ache Remained With Me, And That Little Girl With Her Seaside Limbs And Ardent Tongue Haunted Me Ever Since." "this Then Is My Story. I Have Reread It. It Has Bits Of Marrow Sticking To It, And Blood, And Beautiful Bright-green Flies. At This Or That Twist Of It I Feel My Slippery Self Eluding Me, Gliding Into Deeper And Darker Waters Than I Care To Probe.

I Hope You Will Love Your Baby. I Hope It Will Be A Boy. That Husband Of Yours, I Hope, Will Always Treat You Well, Because Otherwise My Specter Shall Come Out Of Him, Like Black Smoke, Like A Demented Giant, And Pull Him Apart Nerve By Nerve. ... I Am Thinking Of Aurochs And Angels, The Secret Of Durable Pigments, Prophetic Sonnets, The Refuge Of Art. And This Is The Only Immortality You And I May Share, My Lolita.

I Should Allow Only My Heart To Have Imagination; And For The Rest Rely On Memory, That Long Drawn Sunset Of One's Personal Truth.

All The Information I Have About Myself Is From Forged Documents.

And He Absolutely Had To Find Her At Once To Tell Her That He Adored Her, But The Large Audience Before Him Separated Him From The Door, And The Notes Reaching Him Through A Succession Of Hands Said That She Was Not Available; That She Was Inaugurating A Fire; That She Had Married An American Businessman; That She Had Become A Character In A Novel; That She Was Dead.

He Broke My Heart. You Merely Broke My Life.

Some People, And I Am One Of Them, Hate Happy Ends. We Feel Cheated. Harm Is The Norm.

You See, She Had Absolutely Nowhere Else To Go.

I Have Often Noticed That After I Had Bestowed On The Characters Of My Novels Some Treasured Item Of My Past, It Would Pine Away In The Artificial World Where I Had So Abruptly Placed It.

Whenever I Start Thinking Of My Love For A Person, I Am In The Habit Of Immediately Drawing Radii From My Love - From My Heart, From The Tender Nucleus Of A Personal Matter- To Monstrously Remote Points Of The Universe. Something Impels Me To Measure The Consciousness Of My Love Against Such Unimaginable And Incalculable Things As The Behaviour Of Nebulae (whose Very Remoteness Seems A Form Of Insanity), The Dreadful Pitfalls Of Eternity, The Unknowledgeable Beyond The Unknown, The Helplessness, The Cold, The Sickening Involutions And Interpenetrations Of Space And Time.

And Yet I Am Happy. Yes, Happy. I Swear. I Swear That I Am Happy...what Does It Matter That I Am A Bit Cheap, A Bit Foul, And That No One Appreciates All The Remarkable Things About Me-my Fantasy, My Erudition, My Literary Gift...i Am Happy That I Can Gaze At Myself, For Any Man Is Absorbing-yes, Really Absorbing! ... I Am Happy-yes, Happy!

Although I Do Not Care For The Slogan "art For Art's Sake", There Can Be No Question That What Makes A Work Of Fiction Safe From Larvae And Rust Is Not Its Social Importance But Its Art, Only Its Art.

I Think Like A Genius, I Write Like A Distinguished Author, And I Speak Like A Child.... My Hemmings And Hawings Over The Telephone Cause Long-distance Callers To Switch From Their Native English To Pathetic French. At Parties, If I Attempt To Entertain People With A Good Story, I Have To Go Back To Every Other Sentence For Oral Erasures And Inserts.... In These Circumstances Nobody Should Ask Me To Submit To An Interview If By "interview" A Chat Between Two Normal Human Beings Is Implied.

I Am Sentimental,’ She Said. ‘i Could Dissect A Koala But Not Its Baby. I Like The Words Damozel, Eglantine, Elegant. I Love When You Kiss My Elongated White Hand.

The More Gifted And Talkative One's Characters Are, The Greater The Chances Of Their Resembling The Author In Tone Or Tint Of Mind.

Of All My Russian Books, The Defense Contains And Diffuses The Greatest 'warmth' Which May Seem Odd Seeing How Supremely Abstract Chess Is Supposed To Be

The Square Root Of I Is I.

My Very Photogenic Mother Died In A Freak Accident (picnic, Lightning) When I Was Three, And, Save For A Pocket Of Warmth In The Darkest Past, Nothing Of Her Subsists Within The Hollows And Dells Of Memory, Over Which, If You Can Still Stand My Style (i Am Writing Under Observation), The Sun Of My Infancy Had Set: Surely, You All Know Those Redolent Remnants Of Day Suspended, With The Midges, About Some Hedge In Bloom Or Suddenly Entered And Traversed By The Rambler, At The Bottom Of A Hill, In The Summer Dusk; A Furry Warmth, Golden Midges.

I Know More Than I Can Express In Words, And The Little I Can Express Would Not Have Been Expressed, Had I Not Known More.

And Presently I Was Driving Through The Drizzle Of The Dying Day, With The Windshield Wipers In Full Action But Unable To Cope With My Tears.

Revelation Can Be More Perilous Than Revolution.

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 Always Original, And Thus By Its Very Nature Should Come More Or Less As A Shocking Surprise.

A Toothache Will Cost A Battle, A Drizzle Cancel An Insurrection.

Only Ambitious Nonentities And Hearty Mediocrities Exhibit Their Rough Drafts. It's Like Passing Around Samples Of Sputum.

The General Impression Is That Fifteen Year-old Dolly Remains Morbidly Uninterested In Sexual Matters, Or To Be Exact, Represses Her Curiosity In Order To Save Her Ignorance And Self-dignity.

I Have No Desires, Save The Desire To Express Myself In Defiance Of All The World’s Muteness.

I Mean, I Have The Feeling That Something In My Mind Is Poisoning Everything Else.

Lolita, Light Of My Life, Fire Of My Loins. My Sin, My Soul. Lo-lee-ta: The Tip Of The Tongue Taking A Trip Of Three Steps Down The Palate To Tap, At Three, On The Teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

And The Rest Is Rust And Stardust.

Just Like A Man Grieving Because He Has Recently Lost In His Dreams Some Thing That He Had Never Had In Reality, Or Hoping That Tomorrow He Would Dream That He Found It Again. That Is How Mathematics Is Created; It Has Its Fatal Flaw.

The Days Of My Youth, As I Look Back On Them, Seem To Fly Away From Me In A Flurry Of Pale Repetitive Scraps Like Those Morning Snow Storms Of Used Tissue Paper That A Train Passenger Sees Whirling In The Wake Of The Observation Car.

...and The Red Sun Of Desire And Decision (the Two Things That Create A Live World) Rose Higher And Higher, While Upon A Succession Of Balconies A Succession Of Libertines, Sparkling Glass In Hand, Toasted The Bliss Of Past And Future Nights.

It Is Certainly Not Then-not In Dreams- But When One Is Wide Awake, At Moments Of Robust Joy And Achievement, On The Highest Terrace Of Consciousness, That Mortality Has A Chance To Peer Beyond Its Own Limits, From The Mast, From The Past And Its Castle Tower. And Although Nothing Much Can Be Seen Through The Mist, There Is Somehow The Blissful Feeling That One Is Looking In The Right Direction.

Perhaps If The Future Existed, Concretely And Individually, As Something That Could Be Discerned By A Better Brain, The Past Would Not Be So Seductive: Its Demands Would Be Balanced By Those Of The Future.

Literature Is Invention. Fiction Is Fiction. To Call A Story A True Story Is An Insult To Both Art And Truth.

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.

And I Want To Rise Up, Throw My Arms Open For A Vast Embrace, Address An Ample, Luminous Discourse To The Invisible Crowds. I Would Start Like This: "o Rainbow-colored Gods. . .

I Don't Belong To Any Club Or Group. I Don't Fish, Cook, Dance, Endorse Books, Sign Books, Co-sign Declarations, Eat Oysters, Get Drunk, Go To Church, Go To Analysts, Or Take Part In Demonstrations.

Genius Still Means To Me, In My Russian Fastidiousness And Pride Of Phrase, A Unique Dazzling Gift. The Gift Of James Joyce, And Not The Talent Of Henry James.

In A Sense, All Poetry Is Positional: To Try To Express One's Position In Regard To The Universe Embraced By Consciousness, Is An Immemorial Urge. The Arms Of Consciousness Reach Out And Grope, And The Longer They Are The Better. Tentacles, Not Wings, Are Apollo's Natural Members.

I Believe The Poor Fierce-eyed Child Had Figured Out That With A Mere Fifty Dollars In Her Purse She Might Somehow Reach Broadway Or Hollywood - Or The Foul Kitchen Of A Diner (help Wanted) In A Dismal Ex-prairie State, With The Wind Blowing, And The Stars Blinking, And The Cars, And The Bars, And The Barmen, And Everything Soiled, Torn, Dead.

I Do Not Know If It Has Ever Been Noted Before That One Of The Main Characteristics Of Life Is Discreteness. Unless A Film Of Flesh Envelopes Us, We Die. Man Exists Only Insofar As He Is Separated From His Surroundings. The Cranium Is A Space-traveler's Helmet. Stay Inside Or You Perish. Death Is Divestment, Death Is Communion. It May Be Wonderful To Mix With The Landscape, But To Do So Is The End Of The Tender Ego.

A Work Of Art Has No Importance Whatever To Society. It Is Only Important To The Individual.

I Could Also Distinguish The Glint Of A Special Puddle (the One Krug Had Somehow Perceived Through The Layer Of His Own Life), An Oblong Puddle Invariably Acquiring The Same Form After Every Shower Because Of The Constant Spatulate Shape Of A Depression In The Ground. Possibly Something Of The Kind May Be Said To Occur In Regard To The Imprint We Leave In The Intimate Texture Of Space. Twang. A Good Night For Nothing.

No Writer In A Free Country Should Be Expected To Bother About The Exact Demarcation Between The Sensuous And The Sensual; This Is Preposterous; I Can Only Admire But Cannot Emulate The Accuracy Of Judgment Of Those Who Pose The Fair Young Mammals Photographed In Magazines Where The General Neckline Is Just Low Enough To Provoke A Past Master's Chuckle And Just High Enough Not To Make A Postmaster Frown.

Old Birds Like Orlovius Are Wonderfully Easy To Lead By The Beak, Because A Combination Of Decency And Sentimentality Is Exactly Equal To Being A Fool.

A Work Of Art Has No Importance Whatever To Society. It Is Only Important To The Individual, And Only The Individual Reader Is Important To Me. I Don't Give A Damn For The Group, The Community, The Masses, And So Forth.

There Is Only One Real Number: One. And Love, Apparently, Is The Best Exponent Of This Singularity.

A Wise Reader Reads The Book Of Genius Not With His Heart, Not So Much With His Brain, But With His Spine. It Is There That Occurs The Telltale Tingle.

She Had Spent All Her Life In Feeling Miserable; This Misery Was Her Native Element; Its Fluctuations, Its Varying Depths, Alone Save Her The Impression Of Moving And Living. What Bothers Me Is That A Sense Of Misery, And Nothing Else, Is Not Enough To Make A Permanent Soul. My Enormous And Morose Mademoiselle Is All Right On Earth But Impossible In Eternity.

Although We Read With Our Minds, The Seat Of Artistic Delight Is Between The Shoulder Blades. That Little Shiver Behind Is Quite Certainly The Highest Form Of Emotion That Humanity Has Attained When Evolving Pure Art And Pure Science. Let Us Worship The Spine And Its Tingle.

Look At This Tangle Of Thorns.

The Thought, When Written Down, Becomes Less Oppressive, But Some Thoughts Are Like A Cancerous Tumor: You Express Is, You Excise It, And It Grows Back Worse Than Before.

To Begin With, Let Us Take The Following Motto...literature Is Love. Now We Can Continue.

You Know, What's So Dreadful About Dying Is That You Are Completely On Your Own.

Nymphets Do Not Occur In Polar Regions.

My Only Grudge Against Nature Was That I Could Not Turn My Lolita Inside Out And Apply Voracious Lips To Her Young Matrix, Her Unknown Heart, Her Nacreous Liver, The Sea-grapes Of Her Lungs, Her Comely Twin Kidneys.

I Still Dwelled Deep In My Elected Paradise--a Paradise Whose Skies Were The Color Of Hell-flames--but Still A Paradise.

The Cradle Rocks Above An Abyss, And Common Sense Tells Us That Our Existence Is But A Brief Crack Of Light Between Two Eternities Of Darkness.

And She Was Mine, She Was Mine, The Key Was In My Fist, My Fist Was In My Pocket, She Was Mine.

Don't Cry, I'm Sorry To Have Deceived You So Much, But That's How Life Is.

Literature, Real Literature, Must Not Be Gulped Down Like Some Potion Which May Be Good For The Heart Or Good For The Brain—the Brain, That Stomach Of The Soul. Literature Must Be Taken And Broken To Bits, Pulled Apart, Squashed—then Its Lovely Reek Will Be Smelt In The Hollow Of The Palm, It Will Be Munched And Rolled Upon The Tongue With Relish; Then, And Only Then, Its Rare Flavor Will Be Appreciated At Its True Worth And The Broken And Crushed Parts Will Again Come Together In Your Mind And Disclose The Beauty Of A Unity To Which You Have Contributed Something Of Your Own Blood.

It Was An Interesting Thing To Do. Why Did I Write Any Of My Books, After All? For The Sake Of The Pleasure, For The Sake Of The Difficulty. I Have No Social Purpose, No Moral Message; I've No General Ideas To Exploit, I Just Like Composing Riddles With Elegant Solutions.

I Shall Be Dumped Where The Weed Decays, And The Rest Is Rust And Stardust

Was She Really Beautiful? Was She At Least What They Call Attractive? She Was Exasperation, She Was Torture.

A Change Of Environment Is The Traditional Fallacy Upon Which Doomed Loves, And Lungs, Rely.

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.

Solitude Is The Playfield Of Satan.

It Is Strange How A Memory Will Grow Into A Wax Figure, How The Cherub Grows Suspiciously Prettier As Its Frame Darkens With Age-strange, Strange Are The Mishaps Of Memory.

Nothing Revives The Past So Completely As A Smell That Was Once Associated With It.

There He Stood, In The Camouflage Of Sun And Shade, Disfigured By Them And Masked By His Own Nakedness.

Sleep Is The Most Moronic Fraternity In The World, With The Heaviest Dues And The Crudest Rituals. It Is A Mental Torture I Find Debasing... I Simply Cannot Get Used To The Nightly Betrayal Of Reason, Humanity, Genius.

Turning One's Novel Into A Movie Script Is Rather Like Making A Series Of Sketches For A Painting That Has Long Ago Been Finished And Framed.

It Is Strange That The Tactile Sense, Which Is So Infinitely Less Precious To Men Than Sight, Becomes At Critical Moments Our Main, If Not Only, Handle To Reality.

For I Do Not Exist: There Exist But The Thousands Of Mirrors That Reflect Me.

Do Not Be Angry With The Rain; It Simply Does Not Know How To Fall Upwards.

There Is Nothing In The World That I Loathe More Than Group Activity, That Communal Bath Where The Hairy And Slippery Mix In A Multiplication Of Mediocrity.

Non-russian Readers Do Not Realize Two Things: That Not All Russians Love Dostoievsky As Much As Americans Do, And That Most Of Those Russians Who Do, Venerate Him As A Mystic And Not As An Artist.

All My Life I Have Been A Poor Go-to-sleeper. No Matter How Great My Weariness, The Wrench Of Parting With Consciousness Is Unspeakably Repulsive To Me.

Knowing You Have Something Good To Read Before Bed Is Among The Most Pleasurable Of Sensations.

I Loved You. I Was A Pentapod Monster, But I Loved You. I Was Despicable And Brutal, And Turpid, And Everything, Mais Je T’aimais, Je T’aimais!

To Play Safe, I Prefer To Accept Only One Type Of Power: The Power Of Art Over Trash, The Triumph Of Magic Over The Brute.

While A Few Pertinent Points Have To Be Marked, The General Impression I Desire To Convey Is Of A Side Door Crashing Open In Life's Full Flight, And A Rush Of Roaring Black Time Drowning With Its Whipping Wind The Cry Of Lone Disaster.

Readers Are Not Sheep, And Not Every Pen Tempts Them.

Genius Is Finding The Invisible Link Between Things.

If A Violin String Could Ache, I Would Be That String.

Although I Could Never Get Used To The Constant State Of Anxiety In Which The Guilty, The Great, And The Tenderhearted Live, I Felt I Was Doing My Best In The Way Of Mimicry.

Solitude Was Corrupting Me.

Devices Which In Some Curious New Way Imitate Nature Are Attractive To Simple Minds.

And Yet I Adore Him. I Think He's Quite Crazy, And With No Place Or Occupation In Life, And Far From Happy, And Philosophically Irresponsible – And There Is Absolutely Nobody Like Him.

I Cannot Help Feeling There Is Something Essentially Wrong About Love. Friends May Quarrel Or Drift Apart, Close Relations Too, But There Is Not This Pang, This Pathos, This Fatality Which Clings To Love. Friendship Never Has That Doomed Look. Why, What Is The Matter? I Have Not Stopped Loving You, But Because I Cannot Go On Kissing Your Dim Dear Face, We Must Part, We Must Part.

But As Van Casually Directed The Searchlight Of Backthought Into That Maze Of The Past Where The Mirror-lined Narrow Paths Not Only Took Different Turns, But Used Different Levels (as A Mule-drawn Cart Passes Under The Arch Of A Viaduct Along Which A Motor Skims By), He Found Himself Tackling, In Still Vague And Idle Fashion, The Science That Was To Obsess His Mature Years - Problems Of Space And Time, Space Versus Time, Time-twisted Space, Space As Time, Time As Space - And Space Breaking Away From Time, In The Final Tragic Triumph Of Human Cogitation: I Am Because I Die.

Words Without Experience Are Meaningless.

It Was Love At First Sight, At Last Sight, At Ever And Ever Sight.

I Always Call Him Lewis Carroll Carroll, Because He Was The First Humbert Humbert.

Satire Is A Lesson, Parody Is A Game.

When I Try To Analyze My Own Cravings, Motives, Actions And So Forth, I Surrender To A Sort Of Retrospective Imagination Which Feeds The Analytic Faculty With Boundless Alternatives And Which Causes Each Visualized Route To Fork And Re-fork Without End In The Maddeningly Complex Prospect Of My Past.

Some Might Think That The Creativity, Imagination, And Flights Of Fancy That Give My Life Meaning Are Insanity.

We Hasten To Alienate The Very Fates We Intended To Woo.

If He Failed The First Time He Took His Driver's Licence Test, It Was Mainly Because He Started An Argument With The Examiner In An Ill-timed Effort To Prove That Nothing Could Be More Humiliating To A Rational Creature Than Being Required To Encourage The Development Of A Base Conditional Reflex By Stopping At A Red Light When There Was Not An Earthly Soul Around, Heeled Or Wheeled. He Was More Circumspect The Next Time, And Passed.

Oh, My Lolita, I Have Only Words To Play With!

I Witness With Pleasure The Supreme Achievement Of Memory, Which Is The Masterly Use It Makes Of Innate Harmonies When Gathering To Its Fold The Suspended And Wandering Tonalities Of The Past.

The Tiny Madman In His Padded Cell.

All Colors Made Me Happy: Even Gray. My Eyes Were Such That Literally They Took Photographs.

An Active And Creative Reader Is A Re-reader.

A Philistine Is A Full-grown Person Whose Interests Are Of A Material And Commonplace Nature, And Whose Mentality Is Formed Of The Stock Ideas And Conventional Ideals Of His Or Her Group And Time.

A Cluster Of Stars Palely Glowed Above Us, Between The Silhouettes Of Long Thin Leaves; That Vibrant Sky Seemed As Naked As She Was Under Her Light Frock. I Saw Her Face In The Sky, Strangely Distinct, As If It Emitted A Faint Radiance Of Its Own.

Whatever His Secret Was, I Have Learnt One Secret Too, And Namely: That The Soul Is But A Manner Of Being - Not A Constant State - That Any Soul May Be Yours, If You Find And Follow Its Undulations. The Hereafter May Be The Full Ability Of Consciously Living In Any Chosen Soul, In Any Number Of Souls, All Of Them Unconscious Of Their Interchangeable Burden.

My Own Ultraviolet Darling. " Lolita

She Would Try To Relieve The Pain Of Love By First Roughly Rubbing Her Dry Lips Against Mine; Then My Darling Would Draw Away With A Nervous Toss Of Her Hair, And Then Again Come Darkly Near And Let Me Feed On Her Open Mouth, While With A Generosity That Was Ready To Offer Her Everything, My Heart, My Throat, My Entrails, I Gave Her To Hold In Her Awkward First The Scepter Of My Passion.

There Are Teachers And Students With Square Minds Who Are By Nature Meant To Undergo The Fascination Of Catagories. For Them, 'schools' And 'movements' Are Everything; By Painting A Group Symbol On The Brow Of Mediocrity, They Condone Their Own Incomprehension Of True Genius.

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 Have To Cringe And Hide!), In Order To Discern At Once, By Ineffable Signs―the Slightly Feline Outline Of A Cheekbone, The Slenderness Of A Downy Limbs, And Other Indices Which Despair And Shame And Tears Of Tenderness Forbid Me To Tabulate―the Little Deadly Demon Among The Wholesome Children; She Stands Unrecognized By Them And Unconscious Herself Of Her Fantastic Power.

Mind You, Sometimes The Angels Smoke, Hiding It With Their Sleeves, And When The Archangel Comes, They Throw The Cigarettes Away: That’s When You Get Shooting Stars.

Poetry Involves The Mysteries Of The Irrational Perceived Through Rational Words.

There Is The First Satisfaction Of Arranging It On A Bit Of Paper; After Many, Many False Tries, False Moves, Finally You Have The Sentence You Recognize As The One You Are Looking For.

Happy Is The Novelist Who Manages To Preserve An Actual Love Letter That He Received When He Was Young Within A Work Of Fiction, Embedded In It Like A Clean Bullet In Flabby Flesh And Quite Secure There, Among Spurious Lives.

Above All, Beware Of Platitudes, I.e., Word Combinations That Have Already Appeared A Thousand Times.... As A General Rule, Try To Find New Combinations Of Words (not For The Sake Of Their Novelty, But Because Every Person Sees Things In An Individual Way And Must Find His Own Words For Them).

You Lose Your Immortality When You Lose Your Memory.

Don't Touch Me; I'll Die If You Touch Me.

Only One Letter Divides The Comic From The Cosmic.

Between The Wolf In The Tall Grass And The Wolf In The Tall Story There Is A Shimmering Go-between. That Go-between, That Prism, Is The Art Of Literature.

It Is A Short Walk From The Hallelujah To The Hoot.

Alas! In Vain Historians Pry And Probe: The Same Wind Blows, And In The Same Live Robe Truth Bends Her Head To Fingers Curved Cupwise; And With A Woman's Smile And A Child's Care Examines Something She Is Holding There Concealed By Her Own Shoulder From Our Eyes.

We Are Most Artistically Caged.

A Man Who Has Decided Upon Self-destruction Is Far Removed From Mundane Affairs, And To Sit Down And Write His Will Would Be, At That Moment, An Act Just As Absurd As Winding Up One’s Watch, Since Together With The Man, The Whole World Is Destroyed; The Last Letter Is Instantly Reduced To Dust And, With It, All The Postmen; And Like Smoke, Vanishes The Estate Bequeathed To A Nonexistent Progeny.

The Spiral Is A Spiritualized Circle. In The Spiral Form, The Circle, Uncoiled, Has Ceased To Be Vicious; It Has Been Set Free.

Nothing Is More Exhilarating Than Philistine Vulgarity.

...all My Best Words Are Deserters And Do Not Answer The Trumpet Call, And The Remainder Are Cripples.

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 When I Was Alone And Not In Need Of Words.

In And Out Of My Heart Flowed My Rainbow Blood.

My Lolita Remarked: "you Know, What's So Dreadful About Dying Is That You Are Completely On Your Own"; And It Struck Me, As My Automaton Knees Went Up And Down, That I Simply Did Not Know A Thing About My Darling's Mind And That Quite Possibly, Behind The Awful Juvenile Cliches, There Was In Her A Garden And A Twilight, And A Palace Gate - Dim And Adorable Regions Which Happened To Be Lucidly And Absolutely Forbidden To Me, In My Polluted Rags And Miserable Convulsions.

Humbert Was Perfectly Capable Of Intercourse With Eve, But It Was Lilith He Longed For.

And Really, The Reason We Think Of Death In Celestial Terms Is That The Visible Firmament, Especially At Night (above Our Blacked-out Paris With The Gaunt Arches Of Its Boulevard Exelmans And The Ceaseless Alpine Gurgle Of Desolate Latrines), Is The Most Adequate And Ever-present Symbol Of That Vast Silent Explosion.

Why Should I Tolerate A Perfect Stranger At The Bedside Of My Mind?

A Masterpiece Of Fiction Is An Original World And As Such Is Not Likely To Fit The World Of The Reader.

Lolita, Light Of My Life, Fire Of My Loins. My Sin, My Soul.

There Is An Old American Saying 'he Who Lives In A Glass House Should Not Try To Kill Two Birds With One Stone.

Life With You Was Lovely—and When I Say Lovely, I Mean Doves And Lilies, And Velvet, And That Soft Pink ‘v’ In The Middle And The Way Your Tongue Curved Up To The Long, Lingering ‘l.’ Our Life Together Was Alliterative, And When I Think Of All The Little Things Which Will Die, Now That We Cannot Share Them, I Feel As If We Were Dead Too.

The Future Is But The Obsolete In Reverse.

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 His Life Ended In Disaster. This Is The Whole Of The Story And We Might Have Left It At That Had There Not Been Profit And Pleasure In The Telling; And Although There Is Plenty Of Space On A Gravestone To Contain, Bound In Moss, The Abridged Version Of A Man's Life, Detail Is Always Welcome.

My Mind Speaks English, My Heart Speaks Russian, And My Ear Prefers French.

His Wings Were Failing, But He Refused To Fall Without A Struggle.

Loneliness As A Situation Can Be Corrected, But As A State Of Mind It Is An Incurable Illness.

Our Imagination Flies -- We Are Its Shadow On The Earth.

I Shall Continue To Exist. I May Assume Other Disguises, Other Forms, But I Shall Try To Exist.

Curiously Enough, One Cannot Read A Book; One Can Only Reread It. A Good Reader, A Major Reader, And Active And Creative Reader Is A Rereader.

She Was Like Marat Only With Nobody To Kill Her.

Usually I Read Several Books At A Time - Old Books, New Books, Fiction, Nonfiction, Verse, Anything - And When The Bedside Heap Of A Dozen Volumes Or So Has Dwindled To Two Or Three, Which Generally Happens By The End Of One Week, I Accumulate Another Pile.

Human Thought, Flying On The Trapezes Of The Star-filled Universe, With Mathematics Stretched Beneath, Was Like An Acrobat Working With A Net But Suddenly Noticing That In Reality There Is No Net.

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Alejandro Jodorowsky

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