Nabokov

I’m not a dull speaker, I’m a bad speaker, I’m a wretched speaker. The tape of my unprepared speech differs from my written prose as much as the worm differs from the perfect insect — or, as I once put it, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.”

There seem to be three levels of readership: at the bottom, those who go after “human interest”; in the middle, the people who want ideas, packaged thought about Life and Truth; at the top, the proper readers, who go for style.

In 1950 Nabokov would have burned another manuscript, that of a still-incomplete book entitled Lolita, if Véra had not stopped him on his way to the incinerator

This heroic sacrifice is promptly and abundantly rewarded by the fates, who arrange that the mother should be struck down and killed by an automobile.

At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

It is possible that very few people, perhaps only the writer’s wife Véra, knew this secret because Nabokov wrote about it in Speak, Memory in a roundabout way. Véra was well aware that her husband liked women as much as he enjoyed butterflies. But, according to Katherine Reese Peebles, with whom Nabokov had a short love affair when he was a professor at Cornell University in the United States, he liked women and young women, but never adolescents or little girls like Lolita’s protagonist Humbert Humbert did.