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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
Unlikely
Materials
Hero
Choose
Use
Live
Would
Life

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Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created it has its fatal flaw.
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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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My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
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The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
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I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
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...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
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I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
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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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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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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.
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The square root of I is I.
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