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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.

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
Attractive
Least
Call
Beautiful
Really
Exasperation
Torture

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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 have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
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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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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
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Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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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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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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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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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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Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
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I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.
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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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She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
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Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.
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I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
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Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!
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