Paris Review Interview (1986)
Context: You ask if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction.
“Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.”
Source: Lectures on Literature
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Vladimir Nabokov 193
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor 1899–1977Related quotes
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Endpaper Pages, p. 314.
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