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
perfection faces artistic
And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.
art misery melancholy
I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
fall dark night
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
dark swimming men
...that swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born...
life-is-short car pace
Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
literature motto following
To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
believe clown teach
Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
trying sake way
Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
regions
Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.
art crazy mirrors
In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
fall struggle wings
His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.
real life-is guilty
As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.
oval philistines rounds
Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
thousand paraphrase prettiest
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.