I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers - not all of them, of course.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

Love must wait; it must break one’s bones.

Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they're ready to leave

Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.

I'm a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible.

I deem as heroic those who have the harder task, face it unflinchingly and live. In this world women do that.

Dresscodes are for styleless people.

Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.

What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish.

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.

Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.

Merge your consciousness with that of a luminous being ... and then from there to eternity.

I rolled my eyes so far into the top of my head I almost fell over backward.

Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute.

Nature knows best how to organise.

We don't have a prayer of defeating the Red Threat of our generation without a long boom of almost unprecedented duration.

National 21 drinking age, huh, what do you think about that? A bunch of malarkey, whatever malarkey is, man, it's a whole bunch of it.

When a society lacks God, even prosperity is joined by a terrible spiritual poverty.

Some things are worth the wait.

We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.