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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov
Age: 77 †
Born: 1899
Born: January 1
Died: 1977
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Chess Composer
Chess Player
Journalist
Lepidopterist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
St. Petersburg
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vladimir Sirin
Vl. Sirin
Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin
V. Sirin
Good
Composed
Admirable
Reader
Boys
Girl
Book
Writing
Identifies
Mind
Conceived
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
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Imagine me I shall not exist if you do not imagine me try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.
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Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.
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Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the a.non.y.muse roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
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Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
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That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
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There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called powerful novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
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Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own.
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