Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

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.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.

Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.