The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

My Lolita remarked: "You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.

No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.

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