Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.

Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.

There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.