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

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

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

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.

His sole question—“Were you penetrated?”—felt coldly prurient.

Even though her family was black and mine white, I hewed more to her worldview than to the four-in-hand tie knotters riding the club car or going to the Yale game in Cheever’s and Salinger’s and Fitzgerald’s books.

This whole herd of poets—all but Dickinson classically educated—operates on elision and emotional reserve.

Here’s an execrable excerpt from my 1978 poem “Civilization and Its Discontents”

I just couldn’t stop seeing my marriage except colored by our divorce, and I wrote the same pages over and over, not making stuff up, but canting the material one way, then another. At first I wrote events that cast him as perfect and me as a drunken slag. Then I wrote him as an icy WASP and myself as a tender heart.

lacing it all together is his own elegiac longing for some solid ground he never really finds