I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly…

“It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast…

— Emil Cioran

Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never…

— Zadie Smith

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in…

— Joanna Scott

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." —Vladimir Nabokov”

— Leslie Langtry

In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or…

— Alice McDermott

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

— Martin Amis

Popper and Nabokov are very different people in some ways - and I'm ready to devote large chunks of my life to both of…

— Brian Boyd

Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.

— Dean Koontz

“Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.”

— Stacy Schiff

“I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever’s view of the cosmos, and our place in it,…

— Jeffrey Tayler

After so many attempts to mount a musical version of 'Lolita,' the project was well and truly dead by the summer of 1971. Chief…

— Sarah Weinman

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita'…

— Marisha Pessl

Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been…

— Katie Kitamura

“She did not believe Fate as painstaking as her husband; she was more inclined to take matters into her own hands. She had ample…

— Stacy Schiff

“It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable as a…

— Vladimir Nabokov