Quote

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.

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
Looks
Seem
Snow
Tissue
Like
Days
Storm
Repetitive
Morning
Sees
Tissues
Away
Wake
Scrap
Seems
Train
Passengers
Flurry
Used
Car
Storms
Whirling
Back
Paper
Pale
Passenger
Look
Youth
Observation
Scraps

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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
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There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
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I think it is all a matter of love.
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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
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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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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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But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
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It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
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Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
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