All great novels are great fairy tales.

There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.

A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.

But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.

I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.