The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

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.

The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.

All great novels are great fairy tales.