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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

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
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Fiction
Received
Bullet
Quite
Actual
Embedded
Within
Manage
Novelist
Happy
Secure
Bullets
Lives
Flesh
Letter
Young
Letters
Preserve
Flabby
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Clean
Preserves
Spurious
Love
Among
Novelists
Manages

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Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.
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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
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No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
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Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
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in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
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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.
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
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A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
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The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that offensive is frequently but a synonym for unusual and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.
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Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
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Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
Vladimir Nabokov