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

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.
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Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.
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And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
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All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.
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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
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Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.
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He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle.
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Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
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The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
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Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.
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It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?
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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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I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
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But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov