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
home past
One is always at home in one's past...
pride lust sloth
All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
reality deny knows
I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
summer memories reality
A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
art writing fiction
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.
two black hints
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.
letters comic cosmic
Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
life-is howl
Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
knowledge expression littles
I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
mystery reason irrational
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
evolution nonsense nonsensical
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
children writing thinking
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
meaningless
Words without experience are meaningless.
teacher school squares
There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.