What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives 'beautifully' - not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style.

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I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.

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And if I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him.

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For I had reached a point in my life when I came to view words differently. A closer look at language could reveal the secret of life.

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Stories, like food, lose their flavor if cooked in a hurry.

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Written words can also sing.

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As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself.

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To write, you have to want something to survive you.

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It's true and it's easily said that language is material, and something does materialize as one writes.

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Many writers are radical. I am not, because of my age and because of my terrible fear of demagogy.

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