"We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break."

"The lost glove is happy."

"Ink, a Drug."

"Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain - the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed - then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood."

"Logical reasoning may be a most convenient means of mental communication for covering short distances, but the curvature of the earth, alas, is reflected even in logic: an ideally rational progression of thought will finally bring you back to the point of departure where you return aware of the simplicity of genius, with a delightful sensation that you have embraced truth, while actually you have merely embraced your own self... anything you might term a deduction already exposes the flaw: logical development inexorably becomes an envelopment."

"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."

"A destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way - even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications."

"It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow."

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."

"In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth ... and wondering with an immortal Alice at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit ... are the highest form of consciousness."

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

"Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one."

"I had possessed her - and she never knew it."

"A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing "classical music; that two, he was doing it "softly; and that three, "there were not many readers around in summer. I was there, a one-man multitude."

"Genius is finding the invisible link between things."

"A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That's what I like about coincidence."

"Listen-I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life."

"But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?"

"I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't."

"When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor."

"The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured."

"All religions are based on obsolete terminology."

"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."

"A man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one's watch, since together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny."

"We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer."

"You have to be an artist and a madman..."

"Caress the detail, the divine detail."

"There is only one school of literature - that of talent."

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."

"It is interesting to ponder the fact that there is no real difference between what the Western Fascists wanted of literature and what the Bolsheviks want. Let me quote: "The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed. Thus spoke one of the big Nazis, Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture in Hitler's Germany. Another quote: "Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan. Thus spoke Lenin. Both of these are textual quotations, and their similitude would have been highly diverting had not the whole thing been so very sad."

"We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins."

"We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open."

"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."

"For some reason, I kept seeing it-it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina-a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can."

"As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky he realized with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever. It had lasted no more than four days-four days which were perhaps the happiest days of his life. But now he had exhausted his memories, was sated by them, and the image of Mary, together with that of the old dying poet, now remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory."

"Treading the soil of the moon, palpating 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..."

"Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me."

"IphWas a larvorium and a violet:A grave in Reason's early spring. And yetIt missed the gist of the whole thing; it missedWhat mostly interests the preterist;For we die every day; oblivion thrivesNot on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,And our best yesterdays are now foul pilesOf crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.I'm ready to become a floweretOr a fat fly, but never, to forget."

"Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness."

"Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one."

"You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance."

"Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities."

"I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her."

"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."

"It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed."

"A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past."

"We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us."

"The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes."

"Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart."

"The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."