"And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.
~ Vladimir Nabokov ~












The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This ...
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"I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it a...
"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
"Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled......
"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
"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, ...
"as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.
"All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
"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
"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.
"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
"It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
"And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference b