Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.

Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

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

Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

Just because you consider yourself a genius doesn't mean you are smart.

Sometimes people are so genuinely themselves they aren't conscious of the fact they have wronged you

People act like Nirvana invented grunge; they just took it and personified it.

slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.

I don't understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?

We are awakening from the dream of isolation, from the dream of loneliness, and it's a terrible shock.

Servitude degrades people to such a point that they come to like it.

A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Say goodbye to the age-old stereotypes of seduction. Seductive, but not a seductress, a woman wears a scent to reveal her personality.

I believe that philosophy is part of literature, and not the reverse.