“The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.”

— Vladimir Nabokov , book Bend Sinister

Source: Bend Sinister (1963), p. vi.
Context: The term "bend sinister" means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.

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Vladimir Nabokov 193

Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor 1899–1977

Nina Vaca businessperson

Q&A with Nina Vaca, Founder and CEO of Pinnacle Group https://interview.net/nina-vaca-pinnacle/, Interview.net (April 16, 2019)

“Three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder while I was writing, and I now dedicate the book to them. […] First the general reader, the layman […] second the expert [and] third the student.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Preface
The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989)

“As soon as I get an idea, I write a short story, or I start a novel, or I do a poem. So I have no need for a notebook. I do keep files of ideas and stories that didn’t quite work a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago. I come back to them later and I look through the titles.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The Paris Review interview (2010)

“A man with charm is an entertaining thing, and a man with looks is, ofcourse, a sight to behold, but a man with honor - ah, he is the one, dear reader, to which young ladies should flock.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: The Viscount Who Loved Me

“Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, “That were to consider it too curiously.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 64
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“As you can see this is a composition of vertical and horizontal lines which will (in an abstract manner) have to express the idea of rising upwards, of magnitude. This is the same idea which used, for example, to be the guiding principle in the construction of cathedrals. Since only the manner of expression and not the representation has to express this general idea, I have not given any title. An abstract human mind will, of itself, receive the intended impression. I always confine myself to expressing the general.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in Mondrian's letter to Theo van Doesburg, Amsterdam, 1915; as cited in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 234 (transl. Daphne Woodward)
1910's

“Most chess books only sell a few thousand copies, and a book titled something like “Women in Chess” would sell even fewer. The idea with this title was to spread the book outside the competitive chess world. I’m interested in attracting readers who love chess but play only casually, and feminists interested in male dominated fields.”

Jennifer Shahade (1980) chess player

On the title of her book Chess Bitch : Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport
Gothamist interview (2006)

“In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

“Goethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 13
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)

“The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.”

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Vladimir Nabokov 193

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