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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

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
Humble
Proud
Knowing
Something
Sufficiently
Modest
Ego

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Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
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And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
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When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - hoping that I like the book as much as he does - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.
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Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
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The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.
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Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
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The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.
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The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.
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I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
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In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov