Vladimir Nabokov, born 22 April 1899 and died 2 July 1977, was a Russian-American novelist who was praised for his use of complex and original plots, and clever alliteration and wordplay. Nabokov’s Lolita is his most famous novel. He was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times, but never won it. He also made serious contributions as a lepidopterist and chess composer.
Quotes on writing:
- I don’t think in any language. I think in images.
- The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
- Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
- Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
- I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.
- A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
- Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
- Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
- Lolita is famous, not me. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.
- The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
- Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
- The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
- My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
- There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
Tags: april 22, butterflies, genius, memory, style, vladimir nabokov
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