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Vladimir Nabokov

" The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading "

Vladimir Nabokov

Literature , Fiction

" I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists. "

Vladimir Nabokov

Enjoyment , psychology

" a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate‚Äôs way ‚Äî even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications. "

Vladimir Nabokov

Destiny

" Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man's fate "

Vladimir Nabokov

Silent

" I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann...." It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe. "

Vladimir Nabokov

Love , Literature

" This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‚Äòserious‚Äô courses replete with ‚Äòtrends ‚Äô and ‚Äòschools ‚Äô and ‚Äòmyths ‚Äô and ‚Äòsymbols ‚Äô and ‚Äòsocial comment ‚Äô and something unspeakably spooky called ‚Äòclimate of thought.‚Äô Actually these ‚Äòserious‚Äô courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books. "

Vladimir Nabokov

College , academics

" And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I‚Äôm puzzled by the difference b "

Vladimir Nabokov

Literature

" ... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. "

Vladimir Nabokov

Literature

" I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. "

Vladimir Nabokov

Characters

" Vladimir Nabokov‚Äú... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.‚Äù ‚Äï Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature "

Vladimir Nabokov

Art , Literature

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