“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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 1, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name." by Vladimir Nabokov?
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Vladimir Nabokov 193
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor 1899–1977

Related quotes

Davy Crockett photo

“I know, that obscure as I am, my name is making a considerable deal of fuss in the world.”

Davy Crockett (1786–1836) American politician

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.

George Gordon Byron photo

“You are the fools, not I — for I did dwell
With a deep thought, and with a softened eye,
On that Old Sexton's natural homily,
In which there was Obscurity and Fame,
The Glory and the Nothing of a Name.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Churchill's Grave http://mykeep.com/lordbyron/churchillsgrave.html, l. 43.

Francis Bacon photo

“I bequeath my soul to God… My body to be buried obscurely. For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

His will (1626)

Sri Chinmoy photo
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Jeffrey Eugenides photo
Pierre Joseph Proudhon photo

“Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker.”

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist

Source: What is Property? (1840), Ch. I: "Method Pursued in this Work. The Idea of a Revolution"
Context: Of what consequence to you, reader, is my obscure individuality? I live, like you, in a century in which reason submits only to fact and to evidence. My name, like yours, is truth-seeker. My mission is written in these words of the law: Speak without hatred and without fear; tell that which thou knowest! The work of our race is to build the temple of science, and this science includes man and Nature. Now, truth reveals itself to all; to-day to Newton and Pascal, tomorrow to the herdsman in the valley and the journeyman in the shop. Each one contributes his stone to the edifice; and, his task accomplished, disappears. Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us: between two infinites, of what account is one poor mortal that the century should inquire about him?
Disregard then, reader, my title and my character, and attend only to my arguments.

“Out of the maelstrom of happenings we abstract certain bits to attend to. We snapshot these bits by naming them. Then we begin responding to the names as if they are the bits that we have named, thus obscuring the effects of change.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: A fifth kind of semantic awareness has to do with what might be called the "photographic" effects of language. We live in a universe of constant process. Everything is changing in the physical world around us. We ourselves, physically at least, are always changing. Out of the maelstrom of happenings we abstract certain bits to attend to. We snapshot these bits by naming them. Then we begin responding to the names as if they are the bits that we have named, thus obscuring the effects of change. The names we use tend to "fix" that which is named, particularly if the names also carry emotional connotations... There are some semanticists who have suggested that such phrases as "national defense" and "national sovereignty" have been... maintained beyond the date for which they were prescribed. What might have been politically therapeutic at one time may prove politically fatal at another.

Marco Girolamo Vida photo

“The vast applause shall reach the starry frame,
No years, no ages shall obscure thy fame,
And Earth's last ends shall hear thy darling name.”

Gratantes plausu excipient: tua gloria coelo Succedet, nomenque tuum sinus ultimus orbis Audiet, ac nullo diffusum abolebitur aevo.

Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566) Italian bishop

Book III, line 522
De Arte Poetica (1527)

Pearl S.  Buck photo

Related topics