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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.

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
Scoundrel
Scoundrels
Brutal
Never

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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
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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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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
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Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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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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As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.
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Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.
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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.
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The tiny madman in his padded cell.
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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
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Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers and reason corrects the feverish beat.
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It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?
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The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition
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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
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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 a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.
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I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.
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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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