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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling

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
Mazes
Walk
Walks
Talk
Cannot
Starling
Starlings
Daze
Maze

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I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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We are most artistically caged.
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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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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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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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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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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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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
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When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
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The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.
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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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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
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I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.
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Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
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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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