(1899–1977)
Russian-born U.S. novelist and short story writer
Vladimir Nabokov
I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.
July 1962 interview with Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall, in Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), 18.
The interviewer wishes to visit me. He wishes to see my pencil poised above the page, my painted lampshade, my bookshelves, my old white borzoi asleep at my feet. He feels he needs the background music of bogus informality, and as many colorful details as can be memorized, if not actually jotted down (‘N. gulped down his vodka and quipped with a grin—’). Have I the heart to cancel the cosiness? I have.
Vladimir Nabokov’s introduction to Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), n.p.
My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published.
June 5, 1962 interview at the St. Regis hotel in New York City, in Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), 4.
But the books you like must also be read with shudders and gasps. Let me submit the following practical suggestion. Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
Vladimir Nabokov, “Fyodor Dostoevski,” in Lectures on Russian Literature (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 105.
Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple.
Pale Fire: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 1989), 21 (foreword).
How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness.
Speak, Memory (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 24.