Nabokov quotes from 'Strong Opinions'

Quotes from Nabokov's Strong Opinions

Vladimir Nabokov is best known for his novel Lolita, but in 1973 he published a volume of interviews called Strong Opinions that's my favorite among his works.

He always insisted that interviewers allow him to compose his answers in advance, so none of these comments were spontaneous. This arrangement of quotes preserves the sequence of the book:

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
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.
[Kubrick's Lolita] may turn out to be a lovely morning mist as perceived through mosquito netting, or it may turn out to be the swerves of a scenic drive as felt by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance.
As an artist and scholar I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam.
I think that in a work of art there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science.
I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that's about all.
I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade -- demons placed there only to show they have been booted out. Actually, I'm a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty.
The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily scribbling on.
Although I do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake" ...there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.
With the Devil's connivance I open a newspaper of 2063 and in some article on the books page I find: "Nobody reads Nabokov and Fulmerford today." Awful question: Who is this unfortunate Fulmerford?
In point of fact, the greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery.
[Do you believe in God?] To be quite candid -- and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill -- I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game.
[Joseph Conrad] once wrote that he preferred Mrs. Garnett's translation of Anna Karenin to the original! This makes one dream -- "ca fait rever" as Flaubert used to say when faced with some abysmal stupidity.
[How do you rank yourself among writers?] I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile -- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.

The querulous gawk of
A heron at night
Prompts Nabokov
To write.

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