I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
Vladimir NabokovTags: editing publishing publish rewriting rewrite
In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes […], sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose- and that not owning to some blessed pill or potion […] or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug.
Vladimir NabokovThe stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her
Vladimir NabokovTags: lolita
What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion?
Vladimir NabokovWhy our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear.
Vladimir NabokovTags: humor self-referential
There is titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, 'What would have happened if...' and substituting one chance occurrence for another, , observing how, from a gray, barren, humdrum moment in one’s life, there grows forth a marvelous rosy even that in reality had failed to flower. A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a 'thus' and an 'otherwise', with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past.
Vladimir NabokovNone could discern in him the shyness that makes a person so conspicuous among people who know each other well and are bound together by the established echoes of private jokes and by an allusive residue of people's names that to them are alive with special significance, making the newcomer feel as if the magazine story he has started to read had really begun long ago ... and he wonders if they have not deliberately contrived a conversation to which he is a stranger.
Vladimir NabokovI really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything
Vladimir NabokovLiving does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement.
Vladimir NabokovNo, I have as yet said nothing, or, rather, said only bookish words... and in the end the logical thing would be for me to give up and I would give up if I were labouring for a reader existing today, but as there is in the world not a single human who can speak my language; or, more simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even more simply, not a single human; I must think only of myself, of that force which urges me to express myself.
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