I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.

All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.

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.