Quotes About Nabokov

Where, where... M'sieur Pierre mimicked him. You know where. Off to do chop-chop.

He excused himself saying he felt out of sorts, and continued to clean the bowl of his pipe as fiercely as if it were my heart he was hollowing out.

I, on my part, was as naive as only a pervert can be

as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

He was an amateur of sex lore

puzzling that such imitations always pander so exclusively to the eye instead of also copying the damp fat feel of live petal and leaf.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the book or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed the book

L'estil i l'estructura són l'essència d'un bon llibre; les grans idees són estupideses. El estilo y la estructura son a esencia de un buen libro; las grandes ideas son estupideces

Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.

I was as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.

Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.

Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

The creative writing program would replicate the spirit of communal endeavor and mutual influence found in the Paris and Greenwich Village café scenes of an earlier era, but Nabokov was not one for that sort of esprit de corps.

What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.

What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives 'beautifully'--not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style.

I'm convinced that Nabokov wrote his novels around words like agglutinate, siliceous, gardyloo, ophidian, triskelions. That he took an ESL course at a local night school and the teacher wrote those words on the blackboard and said, "Today's assignment is to take these words and use them in a first novel the New York Times will call 'Riveting, truly a classic for the ages.