Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love I love I love I love but you do not.

Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.

the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

Of course, both [Oscar] Wilde & [Vladimir] Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly - for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.)