Vladimir Nabokov

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

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

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

I'm not too secure about my looks. They can always change. I was heavy and overweight as a teenager, so it's hard to be cocky or egotistical.

The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead.

Exeter was, I suspect, more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives of almost anyone else who ever attended the school.