“I won’t hide it: I’m so unused to being — well, understood, perhaps, — so unused to it, that in the very first minutes of our meeting I thought: this is a joke… But then… And there are things that are hard to talk about — you’ll rub off their marvelous pollen at the touch of a word… You are lovely…”
More from Vladimir Nabokov
“Rowdies are never revolutionary, they are always reactionary. It is among the young that…”
“The distortion of a remembered image may not only enhance its beauty with an added…”
“I have no purpose at all when composing my stuff except to compose it. I work hard, I work…”
“Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on 'ideas.'”