---
title: "71 Nabokov Quotes by 50 authors"
description: "Browse 71 Nabokov quotes by 50 authors. Discover the best Nabokov sayings and thoughts."
image: "https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/c68/leslie-langtry-28929_nabokov_you-can-always-count-on-a-murderer-for-a_374762.jpg"
---

> [“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." —Vladimir Nabokov”](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/leslie-langtry/you-can-always-count-on-a-murderer-for-a-fancy-prose-style-vladimir/)

[Leslie Langtry](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/leslie-langtry/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/c68/leslie-langtry-28929_nabokov_you-can-always-count-on-a-murderer-for-a_374762.jpg)

> [What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/martin-amis/what-did-nabokov-and-joyce-have-in-common-apart-from-the-poor-teeth/)

[Martin Amis](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/martin-amis/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/eaa/martin-amis-704_common_what-did-nabokov-and-joyce-have-in-commo_328037.jpg)

> [“Briefly (Vladimir Nabokov) caught the (Superman) fever too, composing a poem, now lost, on the the Man of Steel's wedding night.”](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/stacy-schiff/briefly-vladimir-nabokov-caught-the-superman-fever-too-composing-a/)

[Stacy Schiff](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/stacy-schiff/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/a80/stacy-schiff-7881_nabokov_briefly-vladimir-nabokov-caught-the-supe_1123091.png)

> [“Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/vladimir-nabokov/why-did-i-hope-we-would-be-happy-abroad-a-change-of-environment-is/)

[Vladimir Nabokov](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/vladimir-nabokov/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/873/vladimir-nabokov-198_change_why-did-i-hope-we-would-be-happy-abroad_2799919.jpg)

> [Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/dean-koontz/vladimir-nabokov-said-the-two-great-evils-of-the-20th-century-were/)

[Dean Koontz](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/dean-koontz/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/c0c/dean-koontz-118_20th-century_vladimir-nabokov-said-the-two-great-evil_223608.jpg)

> [Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/lorrie-moore/nabokov-s-adventures-in-language-and-style-and-naked-braininess-are/)

[Lorrie Moore](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/lorrie-moore/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/291/lorrie-moore-870_adventure_nabokov-s-adventures-in-language-and-sty_1364239.png)

> [“ 'I shall vomit,' said Hugh, 'if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot.' ”](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/vladimir-nabokov/i-shall-vomit-said-hugh-if-you-persist-in-pestering-me-with-all-that/)

[Vladimir Nabokov](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/vladimir-nabokov/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/6be/vladimir-nabokov-198_nabokov_i-shall-vomit-said-hugh-if-you-persist-i_1347990.jpg)

> [“Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/stacy-schiff/nabokov-complained-he-was-afflicted-with-total-recall-an-affliction/)

[Stacy Schiff](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/stacy-schiff/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/f93/stacy-schiff-7881_forgetfulness_nabokov-complained-he-was-afflicted-with_211488.png)

> [Vladimir Nabokov liked to examine cruelty and the human condition. That didn't mean he was cruel; there's no evidence he kicked puppies…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/jeff-vandermeer/vladimir-nabokov-liked-to-examine-cruelty-and-the-human-condition/)

[Jeff Vandermeer](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/jeff-vandermeer/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/d0a/jeff-vandermeer-1366_cruelty_vladimir-nabokov-liked-to-examine-cruelt_1918571.jpg)

> [“What would he have to say about the Nabokov Museum in the same city, which during the Stalin era had served as…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/orhan-pamuk/what-would-he-have-to-say-about-the-nabokov-museum-in-the-same-city/)

[Orhan Pamuk](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/orhan-pamuk/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/dee/orhan-pamuk-500_quote_what-would-he-have-to-say-about-the-nabo_1068508.jpg)

> [“Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher.…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/corey-robin/saint-petersburg-in-revolt-gave-us-vladimir-nabokov-isaiah-berlin-and/)

[Corey Robin](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/corey-robin/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/7e4/corey-robin-67037_ayn-rand_saint-petersburg-in-revolt-gave-us-vladi_2728920.jpg)

> [Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/ashwin-sanghi/of-all-the-writers-i-have-read-vladimir-nabokov-has-made-the-biggest/)

[Ashwin Sanghi](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/ashwin-sanghi/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/5a7/ashwin-sanghi-3271_amidst_of-all-the-writers-i-have-read-vladimir_1791035.jpg)

> [I read Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson and Jhumpa Lahiri and Richard Ford, John Updike, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov - all of…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/michelle-zauner/i-read-lorrie-moore-and-marilynne-robinson-and-jhumpa-lahiri-and/)

[Michelle Zauner](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/michelle-zauner/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/8cc/michelle-zauner-5132_john_i-read-lorrie-moore-and-marilynne-robins_1226741.jpg)

> [“Poshlust, Nabokov explains, "is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/azar-nafisi/poshlust-nabokov-explains-is-not-only-the-obviously-trashy-but-mainly/)

[azar nafisi](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/azar-nafisi/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/af0/azar-nafisi-2001_nabokov_poshlust-nabokov-explains-is-not-only-th_1189381.png)

> [“Nabokov once said that the price of being a writer was sleepless nights. But, Nabokov added slyly, if the writer doesn’t have…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/charles-baxter/nabokov-once-said-that-the-price-of-being-a-writer-was-sleepless/)

[Charles Baxter](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/charles-baxter/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/d59/charles-baxter-8009_nabokov_nabokov-once-said-that-the-price-of-bein_962999.png)

> [Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/joanna-scott/vladimir-nabokov-on-bleak-house-or-henry-james-on-the-house-of-the/)

[Joanna Scott](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/joanna-scott/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/576/joanna-scott-21641_bleak-house_vladimir-nabokov-on-bleak-house-or-henry_374851.jpg)

> [Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies.…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/edward-abbey/vladimir-nabokov-was-a-writer-who-cared-nothing-for-music-and-whose/)

[Edward Abbey](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/edward-abbey/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/f1f/edward-abbey-254_beauty_vladimir-nabokov-was-a-writer-who-cared_2135220.png)

> [“She did not believe Fate as painstaking as her husband; she was more inclined to take matters into her own hands. She…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/stacy-schiff/she-did-not-believe-fate-as-painstaking-as-her-husband-she-was-more/)

[Stacy Schiff](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/stacy-schiff/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/d3c/stacy-schiff-7881_fate-destiny_she-did-not-believe-fate-as-painstaking_76142.png)

> [“I told them what I had discovered about Nabokov's sentences: Because the word string and the thoughts behind the words are so…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/daniels-leslie/i-told-them-what-i-had-discovered-about-nabokov-s-sentences-because/)

[Daniels, Leslie](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/daniels-leslie/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/a1f/daniels-leslie-96035_books_i-told-them-what-i-had-discovered-about_436098.jpg)

> [“In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight , Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/azar-nafisi/in-another-nabokov-novel-the-real-life-of-sebastian-knight-sebastian/)

[Azar Nafisi](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/azar-nafisi/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/050/azar-nafisi-2001_children_in-another-nabokov-novel-the-real-life-o_1389675.png)

> [What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/martin-amis/what-did-nabokov-and-joyce-have-in-common-apart-from-the-poor-teeth-2/)

[Martin Amis](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/martin-amis/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/b85/martin-amis-704_common_what-did-nabokov-and-joyce-have-in-commo_687555.jpg)

> [“It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/raymond-carver/it-s-possible-in-a-poem-or-a-short-story-to-write-about-commonplace/)

[Raymond Carver](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/raymond-carver/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/90e/raymond-carver-2821_1983_it-s-possible-in-a-poem-or-a-short-story_2262161.png)

> [ Of course, both \[Oscar\] Wilde & \[Vladimir\] Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly - for… ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/joyce-carol-oates/of-course-both-oscar-wilde-vladimir-nabokov-believe-in-many-things/)

[Joyce Carol Oates](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/joyce-carol-oates/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/93f/joyce-carol-oates-344_ada_of-course-both-oscar-wilde-vladimir-nabo_1242421.jpg)

> [“The Russian-born novelist's writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/mason-currey/the-russian-born-novelist-s-writing-habits-were-famously-peculiar/)

[Mason Currey](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/mason-currey/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/aab/mason-currey-27104_books_the-russian-born-novelist-s-writing-habi_2235863.jpg)

> [“Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazard from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first sentence I knew it wasn't…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/jane-kenyon/reading-aloud-to-my-father-i-chose-the-book-haphazard-from-the-shelf/)

[Jane Kenyon](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/jane-kenyon/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/a86/jane-kenyon-26365_books_reading-aloud-to-my-father-i-chose-the-b_1842696.jpg)

> [“It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/vladimir-nabokov/it-is-indeed-a-tricky-name-it-is-often-misspelt-because-the-eye-tends/)

[Vladimir Nabokov](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/vladimir-nabokov/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/d6d/vladimir-nabokov-198_quote_it-is-indeed-a-tricky-name-it-is-often-m_50758.jpg)

> [“The golden rule of fictional prose is that there are no rules - except the ones that each writer sets for him…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/david-lodge/the-golden-rule-of-fictional-prose-is-that-there-are-no-rules-except/)

[David Lodge](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/david-lodge/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/849/david-lodge-11610_books_the-golden-rule-of-fictional-prose-is-th_1840741.jpg)

> [“I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever’s view of the cosmos, and our place…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/jeffrey-tayler/i-fear-no-hell-just-as-i-expect-no-heaven-nabokov-summed-up-a/)

[Jeffrey Tayler](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/jeffrey-tayler/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/7c2/jeffrey-tayler-46650_atheism_i-fear-no-hell-just-as-i-expect-no-heave_205437.jpg)

> [“A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/vladimir-nabokov/a-warm-flow-of-pain-was-gradually-replacing-the-ice-and-wood-of-the/)

[Vladimir Nabokov](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/vladimir-nabokov/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/c94/vladimir-nabokov-198_beauty_a-warm-flow-of-pain-was-gradually-replac_1672406.jpg)

> [“I refused to have bookshelves, horrified that I'd feel compelled to organise the books in some regimented system - Dewey or alphabetical…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/rebecca-makkai/i-refused-to-have-bookshelves-horrified-that-i-d-feel-compelled-to/)

[Rebecca Makkai](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/rebecca-makkai/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/df3/rebecca-makkai-20617_books_i-refused-to-have-bookshelves-horrified_2762055.jpg)

> [“They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/vladimir-nabokov/they-are-beautiful-heart-rendingly-beautiful-those-wilds-with-a/)

[Vladimir Nabokov](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/vladimir-nabokov/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/b05/vladimir-nabokov-198_america_they-are-beautiful-heart-rendingly-beaut_1063487.jpg)

> [“Music is a form that tends to give shape to rules, social mores, social attitudes, feelings—it does this in a very beautiful,…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/mary-gaitskill/music-is-a-form-that-tends-to-give-shape-to-rules-social-mores-social/)

[Mary Gaitskill](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/mary-gaitskill/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/f37/mary-gaitskill-7551_beauty_music-is-a-form-that-tends-to-give-shape_3068411.jpg)

> [“Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell had quite different gifts, and their self-images were quite different. But, I shall argue, their accomplishment was…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/richard-m-rorty/vladimir-nabokov-and-george-orwell-had-quite-different-gifts-and/)

[Richard M. Rorty](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/richard-m-rorty/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/f45/richard-m-rorty-47645_art_vladimir-nabokov-and-george-orwell-had-q_3229819.jpg)

> [“In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/vladimir-nabokov/in-a-nervous-and-slender-leaved-mimosa-grove-at-the-back-of-their/)

[Vladimir Nabokov](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/vladimir-nabokov/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/a31/vladimir-nabokov-198_dry-lips_in-a-nervous-and-slender-leaved-mimosa-g_1373642.jpg)

> [“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-once-spoke-to-someone-who-had-survived-the-genocide-in-rwanda-and/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/bcf/christopher-hitchens-117_angst_i-once-spoke-to-someone-who-had-survived_2408199.jpg)

> [“The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/james-salter/the-montreux-palace-hotel-was-built-in-an-age-when-it-was-thought/)

[James Salter](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/james-salter/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/eab/james-salter-2584_chess-game_the-montreux-palace-hotel-was-built-in-a_2637505.jpg)

> [“We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens.…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/vladimir-nabokov/we-are-now-ready-to-tackle-dickens-we-are-now-ready-to-embrace-2/)

[Vladimir Nabokov](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/vladimir-nabokov/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/8d4/vladimir-nabokov-198_austen_we-are-now-ready-to-tackle-dickens-we-ar_2334847.jpg)

> [Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/nick-laird/nabokov-quote-i-think-like-a-genius-i-write-like-a-distinguished/)

[Nick Laird](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/nick-laird/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/e1e/nick-laird-17405_books_nabokov-quote-i-think-like-a-genius-i-wr_857208.png)

> ['Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov was bloody hard work but really thrilling.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/domhnall-gleeson/pale-fire-by-vladimir-nabokov-was-bloody-hard-work-but-really/)

[Domhnall Gleeson](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/domhnall-gleeson/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/a44/domhnall-gleeson-7289_bloody_pale-fire-by-vladimir-nabokov-was-bloody_1913344.jpg)

> [“to play a solitary game of chequers, to read, to write – what should I do?”](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/vladimir-nabokov/to-play-a-solitary-game-of-chequers-to-read-to-write-what-should-i-do/)

[Vladimir Nabokov](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/vladimir-nabokov/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/f0f/vladimir-nabokov-198_books_to-play-a-solitary-game-of-chequers-to-r_2530336.jpg)

## Top authors on Nabokov

- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b024/author-vladimir-nabokov-94034.jpg) Vladimir Nabokov 10 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/nabokov/vladimir-nabokov/)

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                        "text": "“What would he have to say about the Nabokov Museum in the same city, which during the Stalin era had served as the office of the domestic board of censors?”",
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                        "text": "Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.",
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                        "text": "“She did not believe Fate as painstaking as her husband; she was more inclined to take matters into her own hands. She had ample reason for doing so. For a Jew in Russia to be a fatalist was tantamount to inviting disaster. Nabokov trusted in a thematic design which could not have looked quite so dazzling, so sure-handed, to someone who was in the habit of gingerly tiptoeing one step ahead of destiny.”",
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                        "text": "“I told them what I had discovered about Nabokov's sentences: Because the word string and the thoughts behind the words are so original, the reader's brain can't jump ahead. There is no opportunity to make assumptions, no mental leapfrogging to the end of the sentence. So the reader is suspended in the perfect moment of now. You can only experience now. The sentences celebrate the absolute instant of creation. \"It takes your breath away.”",
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                        "text": "“In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight , Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality. ”",
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                        "text": "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.",
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                        "text": "“It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.”",
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                        "text": "Of course, both [Oscar] Wilde & [Vladimir] Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly - for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.)",
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                        "text": "“The Russian-born novelist's writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire novel in complete form before he began writing it, this method allowed him to compose passages out of sequence, in whatever order he pleased...”",
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                        "text": "“Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazard from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first sentence I knew it wasn't the thing to read to a dying man: The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. The words disturbed both of us immediately, and I stopped. With music it was the same -- Chopin's Piano Concerto — he asked me to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank little, while the tumors briskly appropriated what was left of him. But to return to the cradle rocking. I think Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss. That's why babies howl at birth, and why the dying so often reach for something only they can apprehend. At the end they don't want their hands to be under the covers, and if you should put your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free; and you must honor that desire, and let them pull it free.”",
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                        "text": "“It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the \"a\" of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the \"o\"- filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. No-bow-cough. How ugly, how wrong. Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a bird-watcher's or caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I always get caught by the word \"nobody\" when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open \"o\" as in \"Knickerbocker\". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle \"o\" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful \"Na-bah-kov\" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now. Incidentallv, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer- rhyming with \"redeemer\"- not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think).”",
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                            "name": "Vladimir Nabokov"
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                        "text": "“The golden rule of fictional prose is that there are no rules - except the ones that each writer sets for him or herself. Repetition and simplicity worked (usually) for Hemingway's artistic purposes. Variation and decoration worked for Nabokov's, especially in Lolita. This novel takes the form of a brilliant piece of special pleading by a man whose attraction to a certain type of pubescent girl, whom he calls a \"nymphet\", leads him to commit evil deeds. The book aroused controversy on its first publication, and still disturbs, because it gives a seductive eloquence to a child-abuser and murderer. As Humbert Humbert himself says, \"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”",
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                            "caption": "“The golden rule of fictional prose is that there are no rules - except the ones that each writer sets for…” — David Lodge",
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                        "text": "“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, thus: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: “One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities.” Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the “power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the most of on this earth. There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage.”",
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                        "text": "“A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.”",
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                        "text": "“I refused to have bookshelves, horrified that I'd feel compelled to organise the books in some regimented system - Dewey or alphabetical or worse - and so the books lived in stacks, some as tall as me, in the most subjective order I could invent. Thus Nabokov lived between Gogol and Hemingway, cradled between the Old World and the New; Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Hardy were stacked together not for their chronological proximity but because they all reminded me in some way of dryness (though in Dreiser's case I think I was focused mainly on his name): George Eliot and Jane Austen shared a stack with Thackeray because all I had of his was Vanity Fair , and I thought that Becky Sharp would do best in the presence of ladies (and deep down I worried that if I put her next to David Copperfield, she might seduce him).”",
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                        "text": "“They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes--que dis-je,of semi-extinct dragons!--while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike.”",
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                        "text": "“Music is a form that tends to give shape to rules, social mores, social attitudes, feelings—it does this in a very beautiful, fluid way. To me the issue of form and formlessness is most strong in the theme of mortality versus a human wish for immortality of a sort. Take, for example, the definition of beauty in fashion. Remember what Alison says at the beginning? She says when she was young she didn’t know what beautiful was. She looked at this woman who everyone was saying was beautiful and she didn’t even know what they were talking about. I experienced that when I was a child. If I loved someone I thought they were really beautiful. And then eventually, I began to get it, the social concept of beauty. Not that I think beautiful is completely imaginary, but beauty is so wide ranging and fluid. Yet there’s a need to say: “This is what it is, and it’s not changing; we’re taking a picture of it to hold it still.” It’s like an impulse to put up a building meant to last forever. An urge to grab and hold something in place when nothing human can be grabbed and held in place. We come into these physical bodies . . . whatever we are takes this shape that is so particular and distinct—eyes, nose, mouth—and then it gradually begins to disintegrate. Eventually it’s going to dissolve completely. It’s a huge problem for people; we can understand it, but it breaks our hearts. And so we’re constantly trying to pin something down or leave a trace that will last forever. “And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita . . .” What other immortality will anyone share?”",
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                        "text": "“Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell had quite different gifts, and their self-images were quite different. But, I shall argue, their accomplishment was pretty much the same. Both of them warn the liberal ironist intellectual against temptations to be cruel. Both of them dramatise the tension between private irony and liberal hope. In the following passage, Nabokov helped blur the distinctions which I want to draw: ...'Lolita' has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann. Orwell blurred the same distinctions when, in one of his rare descents into rant, \"The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda,\" he wrote exactly the sort of thing Nabokov loathed: You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat. In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one another, any thinking person had to take sides... This period of ten years or so in which literature, even poetry was mixed up with pamphleteering, did a great service to literary criticism, because it destroyed the illusion of pure aestheticism... It debunked art for art's sake.”",
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                        "text": "“In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.”",
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                        "text": "“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was . No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”",
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                            "name": "Christopher Hitchens"
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                        "text": "“The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland's Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look across the water, its yellow-ocher awnings are a touch of color in the winter light. It is like a great sanitarium or museum. There are Bechstein pianos in the public rooms, a private silver collection, a Salon de Bridge. This is the hotel where the novelist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and his wife, Véra, live. They have been here for 14 years. One imagines his large and brooding reflection in the polished glass of bookcases near the reception desk where there are bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the year 1849 to 1887, copies of Great Expectations, The Chess Games of Greco and a book called Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta. Though old, the hotel is marvelously kept up and, in certain portions, even modernized. Its business now is mainly conventions and, in the summer, tours, but there is still a thin migration of old clients, ancient couples and remnants of families who ask for certain rooms when they come and sometimes certain maids. For Nabokov, a man who rode as a child on the great European express trains, who had private tutors, estates, and inherited millions which disappeared in the Russian revolution, this is a return to his sources. It is a place to retire to, with Visconti's Mahler and the long-dead figures of La Belle Epoque, Edward VII, d'Annunzio, the munitions kings, where all stroll by the lake and play miniature golf, home at last.”",
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                        "text": "“We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens. In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port. With Dickens we expand. It seems to me that Jane Austen's fiction had been a charming re-arrangement of old-fashioned values. In the case of Dickens, the values are new. Modern authors still get drunk on his vintage. Here, there is no problem of approach as with Austen, no courtship, no dallying. We just surrender ourselves to Dickens' voice--that is all. If it were possible I would like to devote fifty minutes of every class meeting to mute meditation, concentration, and admiration of Dickens. However my job is to direct and rationalize those meditations, that admiration. All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder-blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine, the wick really runs through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger.”",
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                        "text": "Nabokov quote: \"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.\"",
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                        "text": "'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov was bloody hard work but really thrilling.",
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                        "text": "“to play a solitary game of chequers, to read, to write – what should I do?”",
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