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Quotes by Novelist
"Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can."
22
"Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."
22
"The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian."
22
"My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations."
22
"If you had hope, maybe you could find a way to make things change,. Because if you thought about it, there were so many reasons to try."
22
"Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance."
22
"As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod:"Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian."
22
"I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly ! I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick.... When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!"
22
"Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity."
22
"They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despite being one myself."
22
"No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by."
22
"To realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation."
22
"I feel I need a holiday, a very long holiday, as I have told you before. Probably a permanent holiday: I don't expect I shall return. in fact, I don't mean to, and I have made all arrangements....I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something.'Bilbo'."
22
"The earl shook his head, exhibiting a degree of frosty offense that could only be achieved by an aristocrat whose wishes had just been gainsaid. "I've never heard of a man being so eager to confess to the parent of a girl he's just ruined, he said sourly."
22
"Today, it isn't unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers arounf fifteen hundred miles."
22
"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
22
"You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail."
22
"Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath."
22
"It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel."
22
"No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls"-not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress."
22
"It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical."
22
"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."
22
"My mistakes are usually so enjoyable that I tend torepeat them."
22
"Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again."
22
"To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it."
22
"The joys we expect are not so bright, nor the troubles so dark as we fancy they will be."
21
"There are parties and then there are huge major blowout parties. And then there are Olympian parties. If you ever get a choice go for the Olympian."
21
"For me, writing something down was the only road out."
21
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