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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.

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No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do no...more

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It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just kille...more

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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me...more

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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...more

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Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.

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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

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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, ...more

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The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

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Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

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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 b...more

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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" pebble...more

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We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events...more

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One last word,' I said in my horrible careful English, 'are you quite, quite sure that—well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but—well...more