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All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.

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
Sin
Pride
Poetry
Born
Sloth
Three
Deadly
Might
Sins
Without
Lust
Never
Seven

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Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
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I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with.
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Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
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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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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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Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
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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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A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
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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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In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
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Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
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Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
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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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