a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
Vladimir NabokovThere are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar 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.
Vladimir NabokovCuriously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
Vladimir NabokovA novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov