And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods. . .

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.