Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.

Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.

My writing is full of lives I might have led.