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.

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

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.

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

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.