"Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]
~ Vladimir Nabokov ~












The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style...
Show MoreMore Vladimir Nabokov quotes
"For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me...
"A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...
"while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, ...
"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
"Genius is finding the invisible link between things.
"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 b...
"The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writ...
"We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events...
"They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swis...