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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect 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
Reflect
Thousands
Mirrors
Exist
Phantoms

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The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
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There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.
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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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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
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Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
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Look at this tangle of thorns.
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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
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A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
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The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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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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My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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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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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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