Quotes About Author

I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness…I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended […]

And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus.

I think she always nursed a small mad hope.

Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.

All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.

When I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool

I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.

Actually he was a pessimist, and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man.

But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?

even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.

It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle

Good by-aye! she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her

I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder.

Fame in our day is too common to be confused with the enduring glow around the deserving book.

she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling.

Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.

after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure (...)

Yes, I think that of all his books this is my favourite one. I don't know whether it makes one "think," and I don't much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like its manners.