novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made contributions to entomology
and had a serious interest in chess problems.
Nabokov's Lolita
(1955) is frequently cited as among his most important novels and is his most widely known, exhibiting the love of intricate word play and synesthetic
detail that characterised all his works.
What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly.
Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier.
Genius still means to me, in my Russian, fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour.)