A Few Thoughts from Nabokov

Just this morning, I read a 1964 Playboy interview where author Vladimir Nabokov discusses, among other things, his book Lolita. I thought the following quotes were noteworthy:

"But when I was young, in my 20s and early 30s, I would often stay all day in bed, smoking and writing. Now things have changed. Horizontal prose, vertical verse, and sedent scholia keep swapping qualifiers and spoiling the alliteration."

"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."

And finally, in response to a question about whether or not he believed in God, Nabokov replied:

"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."

The interview, which is quite good if you've read Lolita and potentially inscrutable if you haven't, can be read in its entirety here.