Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.
Vladimir NabokovLife is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
Vladimir NabokovI don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
Vladimir NabokovI don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
Vladimir NabokovThat swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
Vladimir Nabokov