Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.

I think it is all a matter of love.

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. ... 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.