A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.

Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.