1. Nabokov om Freud:

It might be rewarding to go into the phylogenetic aspects of the passion male children have for things on wheels, particulary railway trains. Of course, we know what the Viennese Quack thought of the matter. We will leave him and his fellow travelers to jog on, in their third-class carriage of thought, through the police state of sexual myth.

2. Nabokov om Gogol:

As in the scaling of insects the wonderful color effect may be due not to the pigment of the scales but to their position and refractive power, so Gogol's genius deals not in the intrinsic qualities of computable chemical matter (the 'real life' of literay critics) but in the mimetic capacities of the physical phenomena produced by the almost intangible particles of re-created life.

En ständigt återkommande bild: det regnar oavbrutet och en av våra patienter gråter i samtalsrummet, medan hennes uråldriga dinosaurietår kröker sig i sandalerna.

Jag läser om Speak, memory i engelskt original. Hittade den i pocketutgåva på ett kanadensiskt antikvariat i Paris, tillsammans med Nabokovs Gogolbiografi.

"An autobiography revisited". Så även för mig. Jag har också bott på andra gator, i en singlande snö bland vattenlösliga Koranverser.

Det här var extra roligt:

"My old (since 1917) quarell with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes".