Quotes

[in "Speak Memory", his autobiography] But in England, at least in the England of my youth, the national dread of showing off and a too grim preoccupation with solid teamwork were not conducive to the development of the goalkeeper's art.

Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Bertolt Brecht, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me. I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I blandly see accepted as 'great literature' by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Ezra Pound, that total fake.

Every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, and if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then surely another dimension follows - a special Space maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again.

The verbal poetic texture of [William Shakespeare] is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play.

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

I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: "great books"). I am not "sincere", I am not "provocative", I am not "satirical" . . . the future of mankind, and so on, leave me completely indifferent.

[about the US] It is my country. The intellectual life suits me better there than in any other country in the world. I have more friends there, more kindred souls than anywhere.

[about criticism of his novel "Lolita"] What bothered me most was the belief that "Lolita" was a criticism of America. I think that's ridiculous. I don't see how anybody could find that in "Lolita". I don't like people who see the book as an erotic phenomenon, either. Even more, I suppose, I don't like people who haven't read "Lolita" and think it is obscene.

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art - curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy - is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest are topical trash or what some might call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash.

[on the sex scenes in Edmund Wilson's "Memoirs of Hecate County"] The reader . . . derives no kick from the hero's love-making. I should have as soon tried to open a sardine can with my penis.