Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.

I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.

Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.

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

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.