The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

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.

Risk is the stuff that sucks the predictability right out of the very things that we desperately wish were predictable.

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

You know, right often, the body is the best thing we’ve got going for us. A body itself is a shiny object. Something!

If your cat's speaking Latin, you might have a problem.

Imagine watching all that God might have done with your life if you had let him.

A milligram of prevention is worth a kilogram of cure.

What I did to celebrate was I went home to my 535-square-foot apartment by myself and ate supper by myself. That was how I celebrated getting a record deal.

I've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old.

There should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.

'I don't get it,' Caroline said, bemused. 'She's the only one with wings. Why is that?'