It is certainly not then-not in dreams- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

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.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.