My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.

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

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.