On himself
A person of no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life, I never use schoolboy words of four letters, I have never worked in an office or in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had an influence on me. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: butterfly hunting and writing.
On the ironies of Lolita’s subject matter
I rather dislike little girls, and I am not an expert in sexual aberrations. But publishers keep sending me only one kind of fiction: Novels truffled with obscenities and weird incidents.
His early response to the thought of filming Lolita
There is a child in it, and you would have to teach the child things no child should be taught.
After Kubrick raised the age of the actress playing Lolita to 14, and charmed him
I knew that if I did not write the script, somebody else would, and I also knew that at best the end product in such cases is less of a blend than a collision of interpretations.
He rises from bed to lectern
I can have ambulation of thoughts.
On writing on index cards
“I don’t think I’ve ever written anything straight through from beginning to end,” Nabokov says, explaining that the card files make it easier to fill in what he calls “the crossword-puzzle sections” of a work.
His audience
A writer writes for one or two perfect readers, his wife, perhaps, or a friend or two.
His Russian and his English
As a writer, I am better in Russian.
On the first impact of arriving in America
I knew I had come to a wild and wonderful land, and that Americans are a liberal people. You sense it right away in the manner in which they address each other, in the way they walk, and the way they put their hands in their pockets.
On humor
Humor is really a loss of balance—and appreciation of losing it. Also, it involves a fast and free association of values.
* “Lolita’s Creator—Author Nabokov, a ‘Cosmic Joker,’ ” Newsweek, June 25, 1962, 47–50. Interviewer unknown. The interview took place about mid-May, for the May 28 publication of Pale Fire, with VN as the subject of the magazine’s cover illustration.