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If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.

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
Live
Pay
Precious
Hunts
Play
Name
Chess
Tribute
Gauzy
Country
Names
Flying
Metals
Gauze
Make
Possible
Wings
Languages
Stravinsky
Life
Known
Active
Butterfly
Trader
Language
Carry
Russian
Snares
Science
Plant
Plants
Traders
Another
Creatures
Remind
Hunt

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Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.
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One is always at home in one's past.
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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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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 stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
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I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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Curiously enough, one cannot read a book one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
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I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
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The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
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