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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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
Snow
Pity
Dreams
Genius
Imagine
Dream
Anything
African
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But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
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Do not be angry with the rain it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
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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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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 don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
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My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
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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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Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
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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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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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I don't think in any language. I think in images.
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Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.
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And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.
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All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.
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I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
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I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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