
“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”
Interview with Herbert Gold, The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, 4th series (1977), p. 107 ISBN 0-140-04543-0
as quoted by Tracy Daugherty in an interview, Splice Today, 2 Sept 2009.
“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”
Interview with Herbert Gold, The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, 4th series (1977), p. 107 ISBN 0-140-04543-0
“I know, that obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable deal of fuss in the world.”
Preface (1 February 1834)
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834)
Context: I know, that obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable deal of fuss in the world. I can't tell why it is, nor in what it is to end. Go where I will, everybody seems anxious to get a peep at me … There must therefore be something in me, or about me, that attracts attention, which is even mysterious to myself.
As quoted in Los Angeles Times (24 September 1995)
“"Sir!" she checked him. "I think you are talking treason."
"I hope I am not obscure," said he.”
Source: Captain Blood (1922), Ch. V: "Arabella Bishop"
1940s, Why Socialism? (1949)
Quoted in "The man behind 'The Magic Kingdom'" in The Gazette [Colorado Springs http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4191/is_20050507/ai_n14625292/print (7 May 2005)]
“Obscurity is never a virtue.”
“Struggling to be brief I become obscure.”
Brevis esse laboro,
obscurus fio.
Source: Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones (c. 18 BC), Line 25