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Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.

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
Arrow
Arrows
Flies
Mark
Ever

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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
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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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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
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A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
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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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She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
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And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.
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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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There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
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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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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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