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I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.

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
False
Shadow
Windowpane
Azure
Slain

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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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The lost glove is happy.
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Don't touch me I'll die if you touch me.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
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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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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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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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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.
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It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.
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Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
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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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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
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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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Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
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Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity - all this is difficult to admire.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.
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It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
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