I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.

Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.

Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

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.

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.