1. “As an artist and scholar I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam.”
2. “A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”
3. “Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sunflecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.”
4. “Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, "Wolf, wolf," and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born-the tall story had been born in the tall grass.”
5. "I confess, I do not believe in time."
6. “In point of fact, the greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery.”
7. “I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that's about all.”
8. “I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.”
9. “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”
10. “I think that in a work of art there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science.”
11. “It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”
12. “I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.”
13. “Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.”
14. “My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”
15. “My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten -- often several times -- every word I have ever published.”
16. “Only the birds are able to throw off their shadow.The shadow always stays behind on earth.Our imagination flies:we are its shadow, on the earth.”
17. “Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade -- demons placed there only to show they have been booted out. Actually, I'm a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty.”
18. “Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.”
19. “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
20. ”The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.”
21. “Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra--these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known.”
22. “With the Devil's connivance I open a newspaper of 2063 and in some article on the books page I find: "Nobody reads Nabokov and Fulmerford today." Awful question: Who is this unfortunate Fulmerford?”
