Enter the mind of a stalwart, obsessive, aristocratic wordsmith. This is achieved through a carefully selected and edited handful of interviews, tailored with the most careful precision by Mr. Nabokov himself.

Nothing is revealed that compromises this aquarelle of the eclectic yet humble genius. He is transcendent in his understanding of true art, yet sufficiently tarnished by the burdens of his complex identity. This presents a somewhat tragic figure, plodding onwards, butterfly net in hand, to a kaleidoscopic plane strictly severed from the common, the vulgar, the moronic.

The witty and evasive Vivian Darkbloom remains as opaque as ever. Her true nature and motives continue to elude us, adding an air of mystery and intrigue to the already complex tapestry of Nabokov's literary world.

We are left to wonder about the hidden depths and secrets that lie beneath her surface, much like the many layers of meaning and symbolism that Nabokov weaves into his works.

Perhaps one day, through further exploration and analysis, we will be able to catch a glimpse of the real Vivian Darkbloom and understand the role she plays in Nabokov's artistic vision.

Nabokov's interviews were truly AMAZING to read.

He was not only witty and intelligent but also funny and inspiring.

Perhaps it had something to do with his ability to answer all interview questions in writing, but regardless, he seemed like an outstanding individual.

His views were indeed strong!

Most of my classmates found him very arrogant and "above" people.

But it seems that anyone with a strong opinion is often perceived in that way.

It's not as if Nabokov randomly spouted his opinions.

When asked a question, he answered it truthfully.

I very much admire him.

However, the content after the interviews in this book was dreadfully dull.

It made me deduct one star from my review.

I don't understand why he thought it necessary to include letters to his editors with detailed notes on corrections and mistakes in other works.

Why would anyone, except those he was writing to, want to read that?

If the second half of this book were cut off, I would be satisfied.

In this book, we come to understand that Nabokov was somewhat of a self-absorbed asshole.

What a disappointment it is. It's truly a pity that he didn't live long enough to witness the emergence of the blog.

I firmly believe that he would have relished the opportunity to rant about various things on index cards and then have his wife type them into LiveJournal for him.

Perhaps he would have shared his unique perspectives on literature, art, or even the mundane aspects of life.

His writing style, with its vivid descriptions and complex wordplay, would likely have made his blog posts a captivating read.

It's interesting to imagine how he would have interacted with the online community and what kind of impact his blog would have had.

Unfortunately, we can only speculate about these things, as Nabokov passed away before the digital age.

Nevertheless, his works continue to be studied and admired, and his legacy lives on.

I can definitely see why this book is titled "Strong Opinions". It is a compilation of questions posed by journalists to Vladimir Nabokov over the years. In some parts, it gets a bit repetitive as the same journalists essentially ask similar questions. Clearly, a significant portion of his focus is on "Lolita" and the interest the book generated in global literature upon its initial release due to the nature of its subject matter. However, Nabokov also discusses some of his other works and expresses his pride in them. He is undoubtedly an extremely eccentric individual. He also holds very strong opinions about other so-called well-known writers whom most of the world, including me, highly esteems. There are simply too many of them to list. His respect for H.G. Wells was admiral. Anyway, enough from me. Here are some of the best excerpts from the book:

Years of being a teacher and teaching literature at Cornell and elsewhere, I demanded of my students the passion of science and the patience of poetry.

You can approach, so to speak, error upon error to reality, but you never get close enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing, but you can never know everything about one thing: it's hopeless. So we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects.

I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. For example, they don't move their lips when they think.

Time without consciousness, the lower animal world; time with consciousness, man. Consciousness without time: some higher states still.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on ideas. Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means, place the "how" above the "what," but do not let it be confused with the "So what." Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs.

The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.

For nothing dates quicker than radical youth, nor is there anything more philistine, more bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug dancery. By ideas, I meant of course general ideas, the big, sincere ideas which permeate the so-called great novel, and which in the inevitable long run, amount to bloated topicalities stranded like dead whales.

Rowdies are never revolutionary; they are always reactionary. It is among the young that the greatest conformists and philistines are found, e.g., the hippies with their group beards and group protests.

I can only explain God's popularity by an atheist's panic.

Tolstoy said, so they say, that life was a tartine de merde which one was obliged to eat slowly. Do you agree? I've never heard that story. The old boy was sometimes rather disgusting, wasn't he? Why, life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey.

When he slagged off Tolstoi’s Kreutzer Sonata, I knew my relationship with Nabokov was officially over.

He comes across as an absolute wanker who should have kept his mouth well and truly shut.

It's truly a pity that he chose to express such negative opinions about a great work like the Kreutzer Sonata.

Instead of showing respect and appreciation for Tolstoi's masterpiece, he decided to be disrespectful and critical.

Maybe he thought he was being clever or making a bold statement, but in reality, he just came across as arrogant and ignorant.

I can't help but feel disappointed and let down by his behavior.

Stick that shit on a couple of index cards and toss them straight in the bin, hun.

It's not worth wasting any more time or energy on his unfounded criticism.

I'll just move on and focus on the works and authors that truly deserve my attention and admiration.

Vladimir Nabokov is a literary giant whose words and ideas have left a profound impact. In his interviews, he reveals his unique perspective on various aspects of life and art. Nabokov's writing process, as he describes, is a meticulous one. He uses index cards to jot down his thoughts and then carefully arranges them like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This method allows him to create a vivid and detailed picture in his mind before putting it on paper.

Nabokov's views on art and the artist are equally fascinating. He believes that an artist should not be concerned with pleasing the audience but should instead focus on being true to oneself. He also emphasizes the importance of studying the works of others, including those of his rivals, in order to improve one's own craft.

However, Nabokov's opinions are not without controversy. He has strong views on certain literary works and authors, which some may find harsh or even offensive. For example, he dismisses some so-called "great books" as absurd delusions. This shows that Nabokov is not afraid to express his true thoughts and feelings, even if they go against the mainstream.

Overall, Nabokov's interviews provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a great artist. His words and ideas continue to inspire and challenge readers and writers alike.

“I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

Vladimir Nabokov lets us know directly that his every word recorded in these interviews was carefully and thoughtfully written out after having received, in writing, specific questions from the respective interviewers. In other words, in typical Nabokov fashion, his answers are the result of much reflection and written in solitude. The topics covered range from his childhood in Russia to Hollywood films, from his literary critics to beauties of language. To share a sample of what a reader will find in Nabokov's provocative answers to interviewer questions, below are a number of VN quotes along with my modest comments:

“I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life. I never use schoolboy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office or in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever. Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent.”

No wonder Nabokov enjoyed chess problems, since, unlike an actual game of chess with an opponent, a chess problem permits a person to work out a solution in solitude. Personally, I very much enjoy the fact he preferred to live his life without direct public involvement or a clamoring to be in the limelight, he was never drunk or never had to resort to using four letter schoolboy words, he was never a joiner or ever once affiliated himself with a group or movement.

On writing his novels: “I find now that index cards are really the best kind of paper that I can use for the purpose. I don’t write consecutively from the beginning to the next chapter and so on to the end. I just fill in the gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my mind, picking out a piece here and a piece there and filling out part of the sky and part of the landscape and part of the – I don’t know, the carousing hunters.”

Such a unique approach – I can visualize VN penning a highly artful sentence on an index card and then, like an expert lepidopterist painstakingly pinning a butterfly correctly on a board, carefully placing the card at exactly the right spot in his card box. Observing how a great novelist developed his own highly personalized methodology in writing his novels can perhaps open us up to discover unconventional approaches to our own writing and art.

“I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.”

Echoes of the Bard: “This above all else. To thy own self be true.” Ultimately, we have to live with our own writing, our own creation. If we take even a first step in abandoning our vision to placate, accommodate or please others, according to VN, we are no longer a serious artist.

“A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world. Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child’s scrawl on the fence, and the crank’s message in the market place. Art is never simple.”

It has been said again and again, if we want to be good writers, we must be good readers, reading widely and deeply. I recall even Stephen King in his book On Writing emphatically insists, as a first step in becoming a writer seeking publication and an appreciative audience, we need to make a lifetime practice of daily reading.

“I have no ear for music, a shortcoming I deplore bitterly. When I attend a concert – which happens about once in five years – I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, these take over and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.”

If you are committed to literature and the arts and have a weakness or two or three in any particular area, no need to despair as even the great Vladimir Nabokov didn’t have it all his own way in the world of the arts.

“I could never explain adequately to certain students in my literature classes, the aspects of good reading – the fact that you read an artist’s book not with your heart (the heart is a remarkably stupid reader), and not with your brain alone, but with your brain and spine. “Ladies and gentlemen, the tingle in the spine really tells you what the author felt and wished you to feel.”

Food for thought. I suspect the heart can play a large part, even a huge part, for many readers of fiction. My sense is Nabokov was warning his students of being overly sentimental in their assessment of literature.

“There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch – mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called “powerful” novel – full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialogue.”

Tastes are so individual. Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig is written almost entirely in dialogue. Does this disqualify it from being an excellent work of literature? My own judgement is “no” as each work should be assessed individually.

“I have never been able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose. As a matter of fact, I would be inclined to define a good poem of any length as a concentrate of good prose, with or without the addition of recurrent rhythm and rhyme. The magic of prosody may improve upon what we call prose by bringing out the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there are also certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat of thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom and intonation.”

Anyone familiar with Lolita, especially read by Jeremy Irons, knows Nabokov’s novel is pure poetry.

\\"Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called “great books”. That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak’s melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered “masterpieces,” or at least what journalists call “great books,” is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.”

Strong opinions, anyone? Ouch! That can really sting, Vladimir. William Faulkner’s bold innovations, including his novelistic construction and weaving of time, has provided inspiration for many first-rate authors, including a number of Latin American writers of magical realism. I included this VN quote as an example of just how lively and contentious his views and opinions.


White to play and mate in three. Nabokov enjoyed the icy solitude of chess problems.

Interviews and letters to the editor are truly admirable and deserve a full 5 stars.

These forms of communication play a crucial role in various aspects. Interviews provide a platform for in-depth conversations, allowing us to gain insights into the minds and experiences of different individuals. They can uncover hidden stories, offer unique perspectives, and spark important discussions.

Similarly, letters to the editor give the public a voice, enabling them to express their opinions, concerns, and suggestions. They can influence public discourse, hold institutions accountable, and contribute to the democratic process.

The value of both interviews and letters to the editor cannot be overstated. Their quality, thoughtfulness, and impact make them worthy of the highest praise and recognition.

We should encourage and support more of these forms of communication to foster a more informed, engaged, and vibrant society.

A rather fascinating compilation of essays and interviews penned by the author of "Lolita". Nabokov, who taught literature at Cornell and was a trilingual scholar, this fact is evident throughout. I wouldn't suggest this book to those anticipating a gripping narrative. Instead, it is tailored for literary enthusiasts who possess an unnatural patience and a penchant for minutiae and an elegant (or perhaps whimsical) turn of phrase. It is also for those who happen to be fans of Nabokov (I was one at one time), who chuckle and snicker at their favorite author's stubbornness, pedantry, and so on.

Nabokov's tone is pedantic, often in a highly amusing manner. He is like your mother-in-law, determined to dispute (or even outright deny) the validity of anything you say, sometimes even before you've said it. ("Such-and-such critic has the audacity to present as proof of Oscar Wilde's proficiency in French the play 'Salome', originally written in that language. That's nonsense, Wilde's French was poor...") - and so forth.

His responses to some of his critics are simply hysterical. It's as if he relishes in taking on those who dare to question his literary genius. His arguments are often passionate and delivered with a certain flair that can only be described as quintessentially Nabokovian.

Repetitive at times. A random selection.

Some valuable fragments.

This description seems to suggest that there is a certain degree of repetitiveness in the content. It might be that certain ideas or elements are being repeated without much variation. Additionally, the mention of a random selection implies that there is a lack of a clear and systematic approach in choosing the components.

However, it is also noted that there are some valuable fragments within this. These could potentially be the亮点 or important aspects that stand out despite the overall flaws. It is important to identify and extract these valuable parts in order to make the most of the content.

Perhaps a more careful review and reorganization could help to reduce the repetitiveness and enhance the overall coherence and value of the selection.

Entertainment is an essential part of our lives. It comes in various forms, such as movies, music, sports, and games.

We engage in entertainment to relax, unwind, and have fun. It allows us to escape from the stresses and pressures of daily life and enter a world of enjoyment.

Movies, for example, can transport us to different times and places, while music can touch our emotions and make us feel a range of feelings.

Sports provide an opportunity for us to be active and competitive, and games can challenge our minds and keep us entertained for hours.

Whether we prefer to watch, listen, participate, or play, there is an entertainment option for everyone.

It enriches our lives and makes us feel more alive and fulfilled.

So, the next time you're looking for a way to have some fun, consider exploring the many forms of entertainment available and see where it takes you.

The interviews are truly brilliant.

In fact, they are so outstanding that the other two parts, namely letters to editors and articles, seem rather lackluster in comparison.

However, it should be noted that these other two components are also clearly well above average.

The interviews have a certain charm and depth that set them apart. They offer unique perspectives, in-depth insights, and engaging conversations.

The way the interviewers ask questions and the responses they receive make for captivating reading or listening.

On the other hand, the letters to editors and articles, while not as remarkable as the interviews, still possess a certain quality.

They may present interesting viewpoints, offer valuable analysis, or provide useful information.

Overall, the interviews steal the show, but the other two parts also contribute to the overall quality of the publication or program.

Each component has its own merits and together they create a well-rounded and engaging collection of content.

3.5 stars, rounded up.

If you are a die-hard Nabokov fan, this book, which is a compilation of diverse interviews and miscellaneous writings, is bound to captivate you.

It is replete with his sharp and acerbic wit, as well as his thoughts and opinions on a plethora of subjects.

Although some of the interview responses may seem repetitive at times, Nabokov's viewpoints do offer you a profound understanding of the man himself: he was prickly, highly opinionated, and undeniably brilliant.

His unique perspective on literature, art, and life in general is both refreshing and thought-provoking.

Whether you are new to Nabokov's work or a long-time admirer, this collection is sure to provide you with hours of engaging reading and a deeper appreciation for one of the greatest literary minds of the 20th century.