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Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

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
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Pity
Beauty
Art
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
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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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Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity - all this is difficult to admire.
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And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
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She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
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Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
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Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac) and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets.
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My Carmen, I said (I used to call her that sometimes) we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed. ... Because, really, I continued, there is no point in staying here. There is no point in staying anywhere, said Lolita.
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