"

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

"

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

"

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

"

as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

"

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

"

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.

"

Vladimir Nabokov“... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I...more

"

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I sh...more

"

We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally a...more

"

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus le...more