The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.

The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

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

Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.

She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward first the scepter of my passion.

As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.