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

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This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends ’ and ‘schools...more

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Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

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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...more

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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...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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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

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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......more

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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

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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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I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of h...more

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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

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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.

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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

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Ink, a Drug.