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The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious it has been set free.

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
Circle
Circles
Free
Form
Spiritualized
Spiral
Spirals
Ceased
Vicious

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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
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Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.
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I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.
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I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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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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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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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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Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.
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I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.
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...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
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Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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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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