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Maybe any writer who yaps about her work outside brief interviews comes off as a car salesman. Or worse, as if she’s touting herself as the doyenne.

Some memories—often the best and worst—burn inside us for lifetimes, florid, unforgettable, demanding to be set down.

the kind of grotesque portraits Nabokov can paint of family underlings like his neurasthenic governess Mademoiselle

Nabokov’s sentences go on for lines and sometimes pages, and his highfalutin diction sprouts naturally from his polyglot education and rarefied background

Many older people, by choice or perforce, have no contact with children at all