Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.

The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.

Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.

The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.