#213

“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense” (Nabokov, 2000: 27).

NABOKOV, Vladimir (2000). Pnin. London: Penguin Books.

#212

“In serene retrospect, however, and judged by artistic and scholarly standards alone, the books produced in vacuo by émigré writers seem today, whatever their individual faults, more permanent and more suitable for human consumption than the slavish, singularly provincial and conventional streams of political consciousness that came during those same years from the pens of Soviet authors whom a fatherly state provided with ink, pipes and pullovers” (id, 213).

#211

“Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much” (Nabokov, 2000: 5).

NABOKOV, Vladimir (2000). Speak, Memory. London: Penguin Books.

#158

“It is strange, the morbid inclination we have to derive satisfaction from the fact (generally false and always irrelevant) that a work of art is traceable to a “true story”. Is it because we begin to respect ourselves more when we learn that the writer, just like ourselves, was not clever enough to make up a story himself? Or is something added to the poor strength or our imagination when we know that a tangible fact is at the base of the “fiction” we mysteriously despise? Or taken all in all, have we here that adoration of the truth which makes little children ask the story-teller “Did it really happen?”” (Nabokov, 1961: 40).

NABOKOV, Vladimir (1961). Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions.

#22

“Sebastian speaking of his very first novel (unpublished and destroyed) explained that it was about a fat young student who travels home to find his mother married to his uncle; this uncle, an ear-specialist, had murdered the father's student
(...)
Sebastian in the summer of 1922 had overworked himself and, suffering from hallucinations, used to see a kind of optical ghost – a black-robed monk moving swiftly towards him from the sky” (id: 55).

#21

“... Many a time have I said to him: Sebastian, be careful, women will adore you. And he would reply with a laugh: Well, I'll adore women too...” (Nabokov, 1995: 19).

NABOKOV, Vladimir (1995). The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight. London: Penguin Books.