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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?

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
Life
Unlikely
Materials
Hero
Choose
Use
Live
Would

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Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.
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I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
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The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
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I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
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in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
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Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.
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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
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We are most artistically caged.
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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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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
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Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
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And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy...What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me-my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift...I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing-yes, really absorbing! ... I am happy-yes, happy!
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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
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What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
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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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