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Extracts from interviews of Nabokov
Culled from 4 interviews in Nabokov's *Strong Opinions*. He refused interviews *ex tempore/viva voce*; each of these was a submission of written questions to which he then replied, & which later editors fashioned into dialogues **-------------------------** [**BBC 1962**](http://bit.ly/pbgJPL) * I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions * I don't think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning; a room filled with people wearing his own mask * I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations * all art is deception & so is nature * I am very careful to keep my characters beyond the limits of my own identity. Only the background of the novel can be said to contain some biographical touches * I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages *In Pale Fire one says reality is neither the subject nor the object of real art, which creates its own reality* Reality is a very subjective affair... a kind of gradual accumulation of information; & as specialization. If we take any kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. & yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer & nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, & hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more & more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it's hopeless; we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects * I don't write consecutively from the beginning to the next chapter; I just fill in the gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my mind, picking out a piece here & there **-------------------------** [**1962 Queen Elizabeth Magazine**](http://bit.ly/qwrO8h) * Nothing bores me more than political novels & the literature of social intent. * No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever * I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary... needs paper; Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle * As an artist & scholar I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols & the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam * I was bilingual as a baby (Russian & English) & added French at 5 years of age * I pride myself on being a person with 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 * I am not interested in groups, movements, schools of writing... I am interested only in the individual artist **-------------------------** [**Playboy 1964**](http://bit.ly/3P4O0a) * I thought the movie [Lolita] was absolutely first-rate... All I did was write the screenplay * Not pronounced as most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy "L" & a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop" * I am all for the ivory tower, & for writing to please one reader alone- one's own self * A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual & only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses; Although I do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake" because such promoters of it as Oscar Wilde & various dainty poets, were in reality rank moralists & didacticists; what makes a work of fiction safe from rust is not its social importance but only its art * A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world; to do this adequately he should know the given world. Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art; Art is never simple; I automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase "sincere & simple" under the impression that this was the greatest compliment payable. When I struck the phrase out, which I did with such rage in my pencil that it ripped the paper, the student complained that this was what teachers had always taught him: "Art is simple, art is sincere." Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful & complex * I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist. Whether or not critics think that in Lolita I am ridiculing human folly leaves me supremely indifferent * Freudism & all it has tainted with its grotesque implications & methods appears to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves & on others. I reject it utterly along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional or the very sick * *Is it true that you write standing up, & write in longhand rather than on a typewriter?* Yes. I never learned to type. I generally start the day at a lovely old-fashioned lectern * I am an American writer, born in Russia, educated in England & where I studied French literature, before spending fifteen years in Germany * it is the individual artist that counts; Not general ideas but the individual contribution * Translating Russian into English is a little easier than translating English into Russian, & 10 times easier than translating English into French *Dostoevski dealt with themes accepted by most as universal in significance, yet you described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy & vulgar."* Non-Russian readers do not realize not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, & most Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic & not as an artist. He was a claptrap journalist & his sensitive murderers & soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment- by this reader anyway *You called Hemingway & Conrad "writers of books for boys"?* That's exactly what they are. Hemingway at least a voice of his own. But I cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, romanticist cliches. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality & emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile, & the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the consolation & support of graduate students * not quite first-rate Eliot & of definitely second-rate Pound; completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why anybody should bother about them * I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel, full of commonplace obscenities & torrents of dialogue; when I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher "hoping that I like the hook as much as he does" I check first of all how much dialogue there is, & if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang & ban it from my bed *Any contemporary authors you enjoy reading?* I do have a few favorites: Robbe-Grillet & Borges *You have written that poetry represents "the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. " But many feel the "irrational" has little place in an age when the exact knowledge of science has begun to plumb the most profound mysteries of existence* This appearance is very deceptive; a journalistic illusion. The greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery. I don't believe that any science today has pierced any mystery... "science" as the study of visible & palpable nature, or the poetry of pure mathematics & pure philosophy remains as hopeless as ever. We shall never know the origin of life, the meaning of life, the nature of space & time, or the nature of nature, or the nature of thought * I know more than I can express in words, & the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more **-------------------------** [**TV-13 NY 1965**](http://bit.ly/qLC39a) * Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism * second-rate & ephemeral the works of a number of puffed-up writers- such as Camus, Lorca, Kazantzakis, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Thomas Wolfe, & literally hundreds of other "great" second-raters. & for this I'm automatically disliked by their camp/kitsch/fashion-followers, & all kinds of automatons * formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Gorky... used to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed & amused by fabricated notions about so-called great books. Mann's asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak's melodramatic & vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner's corncobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces," is to me an absurd delusion * My greatest masterpieces of 20th century prose are, in order: Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Transformation, Biely's Petersburg & the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time * I think Salinger & Updike are by far the finest artists in recent years. The sexy, phony type of best seller, the violent, vulgar novel, the novelistic treatment of social or political problems, & novels consisting mainly of dialogue or social comment banned from my bedside * my best Russian novel is The Gift; American are Lolita & Pale Fire * I'm supremely indifferent to adverse criticism to my fiction more