I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
Vladimir NabokovThe good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
Vladimir NabokovMy Lolita remarked: "You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.
Vladimir NabokovSome people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
Vladimir Nabokov