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
reading writing pleasure
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
rainbow crowds addresses
And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods. . .
art angel thinking
I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
events ornaments possibility
Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.
life country butterfly
If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.
memories soup usual
Memory overshadows the present and dims the future "into something thicker than its usual pea soup."
style fancy murder
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
character past world
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
war loathing details
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
vulgarity-is philistines vulgarity
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
death night thinking
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.
block cutting curves
Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
men games numbers
Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
past drunk impossible
I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.