Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin; 22 April 1899c – 2 July 1977) was a Russian-American novelist. His first nine novels were in Russian, and he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth23 April 1899
CitySaint Petersburg, Russia
CountryUnited States of America
movie writing long-ago
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.
style matter firsts
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
fiction world fit
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
oval philistines rounds
Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
laughing pesticides good-laugh
A good laugh is the best pesticide.
responsibility answers doe
My answer to your question'Does the writer have a social responsibility?' is NO.You owe me ten cents, sir.
thousand paraphrase prettiest
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
taken mean mirrors
The term "bend sinister" means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.
trying sake way
Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
feet use urges
I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with.
fiction letters flesh
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
vulgarity-is philistines vulgarity
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
war loathing details
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
style fancy murder
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.