Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.

Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?

My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.

And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.

I don't think in any language. I think in images.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.