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
there comes a time in life, when you realize that everything is a dream; only those things which are written down have any possibility of being real.
One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.
Writers really don’t retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot.
He was the friend of my life. You know, you only have one friend like that; there can’t be two.
But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.
Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.
He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
I can’t explain it. It’s what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can’t do and what you must do. You just turn to dust.
For those we are born to speak to we need prepare nothing, the lines are ready, everything is there.
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.
You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.
In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.
There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.
I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.