
“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”
Source: Barchester Towers (1857), Ch. 27
Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”
Source: Barchester Towers (1857), Ch. 27
“Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English.”
[199709032332.QAA21669@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997
Interview with Richard B. Sale (1969)
Context: But to poetry — You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. And the prayerful state is just being passive with it, mumbling, being around there, lying on the grass, going swimming, you see. Even getting drunk. Get drunk prayerfully, though.
As quoted in "Nabokov's Love Affairs" by R. W. Flint http://www.powells.com/review/2003_07_17.html in The New Republic (17 June 1957).
On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956)
“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.”
Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
“The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing - and then marry him.”
"Why Read New Books?" The New York Review of Books (11 November 2014).
“She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.”
Source: Cold Comfort Farm