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

Memory overshadows the present and dims the future "into something thicker than its usual pea soup."

Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?

Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green see-saw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.

My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.