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I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.

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
Young
Probably
Daughters
Human
Since
Odd
Humans
Heard
Daughter
People
Names
Responsible
Fact
Female
Given
Beings
Facts
Seem
Lolita
Seems
Name
Poodles

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The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
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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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There was no Lo to behold.
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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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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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The square root of I is I.
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I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with.
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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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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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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
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