JJ Vladimir Quotes

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.

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.

A thousand years ago five minutes wereEqual to forty ounces of fine sand.Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime andInfinite aftertime: above your headThey close like giant wings, and you are dead.

It’s quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will…

His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.

(T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.

You can only die once, to make sure it's worth it.

I dreamt of you last night - as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.

Nothing so removes a man from his inner, mysterious, real life, nothing makes him so deaf and dumb as the picture of these petty passions and petty crimes which calls itself the world of politics.

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?

as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...

She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.

In olden days people were worse than us but knew much more than us.

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.

It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

If the first job one has in a given profession acts as a tuning fork for the career that follows, Frederick Thomas was attuned from the start to a pitch of the highest quality.

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference b

... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

The soulless have no need of melancholia

[S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.

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

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.

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

I had possessed her - and she never knew it.

The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy

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

Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight

...for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.

Pride is the chalice into which all human sins are poured: it glitters and jingles and its arabesque lures your gaze, while your lips involuntarily touch the seductive beverage.

He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

...I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book....

He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.

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

In this very special self-hypnotic state there can be no question of getting out of touch with on[e]self and floating into a normal sleep (unless you are very tired at the start)

Somehow, people always forget that it's much easier to install a dictator than to remove one

One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one's enemies

Dictators seem to learn from history much better than democrats

Have you seena dog lick the hand that thrashed it?!

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the street lights

If a fox strangles a goose just to eat the brains, you wouldn’t say the fox killed the brains. You’d say the fox offed the goose.

When things in the country are in the pits, start a war with somebody.

Everything he said should be followed by a big sic

All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.