Quote

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
Within
Manage
Novelist
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

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... my mind lay limp in an empty world.
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My characters are galley slaves.
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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
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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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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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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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While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.
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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
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I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!
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I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
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Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.
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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
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I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
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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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