Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin; 22 April 1899c – 2 July 1977) was a Russian-American novelist. His first nine novels were in Russian, and he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth23 April 1899
CitySaint Petersburg, Russia
CountryUnited States of America
girl book writing
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.
mother eight air
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
nature past smell
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
art important individual
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
thinking language
I don't think in any language. I think in images.
butterfly dark kissing
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 .
art simple differences
I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts.
real numbers repetition
The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition
trying littles forests
Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.
memories immortality loses
You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
looks thorns
Look at this tangle of thorns.
strong morning kissing
- Might it console you to know that I expect nothing but torture from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise? She shook her head. - That my admiration for you is painfully strong? - I want Van – she cried – and not intangible admiration. - Intangible? You goose. You my gauge it, you may brush it once very lightly with the knuckles of you gloved hand. I said knuckles. I said once. That will do. I can't kiss you. Not even your burning face. Good-bye, pet. Tell Edmond to take a nap after he returns. I shall need him at two in the morning.
heart speak-english mind
My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
believe destiny sky
Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.