Explore Quotations, Proverbs & Sayings

«Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.»

«She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms, she was always Lolita.»

«I confess, I do not believe in time.»

«[Against whom was it turned? Against whom did he conspire?] Tum-tee-tum. And once more - TUM! ... I have not gone mad. I am merely producing gleeful little sounds. The kind of glee one experiences upon making an April Fool of someone. And a damned good fool I have made of someone. Who is he? Gentle reader, look at yourself in the mirror.»

«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.»

«There is only one school of literature -- that of talent.»

«It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.»

«Solitude is the playfield of Satan.»

«Lolita»

«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. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged -- the same house, the same people -- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.»