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I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.

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
Upon
Dream
Inflicting
Vienna
Umbrella
Elderly
Gentleman
Personality
Dreams

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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
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My little cup brims with tiddles.
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He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
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Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers and reason corrects the feverish beat.
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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Solitude was corrupting me.
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One is always at home in one's past.
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
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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.
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Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
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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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It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.
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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 good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
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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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All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
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Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.
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