If I say that Nabokov, who was educated in England... turns out to be a master of English prose - the most extraordinary phenomenon of the kind since Conrad - this is likely to sound incredible. If I say that Nabokov is something like Proust, something like Franz Kafka, and, probably something like Gogol, I shall suggest an imitative patchwork, where Nabokov is as completely himself as any of these others - a man with a unique sensibility and a unique story to tell.

Oh, 'impressed' is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic …

Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book - all right then - a great book.

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.

Your tenderness and terrorization, your prose sentences - like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and-for-all.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is like that lengt…