The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

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

My characters are galley slaves.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.