A Quote by Samantha Hunt

One book that has meant much to my writing is W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants. He uses a photograph of Vladimir Nabokov hunting butterflies in a similar way. The image or a reference to the image is traced throughout the four separate narratives. It sometimes seems to be the only link between the pieces, while the symbol Nabokov cuts remains wide open, a pencil sketch, a mystery to interpret outside his role as emigrant/observer.

Samantha Hunt

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Between Book Butterflies Cuts Four His Hunting Image Interpret Link Meant Much Mystery Narratives Observer One Book Only Open Outside Pencil Photograph Pieces Reference Remains Role Seems Separate Similar Sketch Sometimes Symbol Throughout Uses Way While Wide Writing

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Samantha Hunt
American - Novelist
Born: 1971

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

Edward Abbey

Of course, both [Oscar] Wilde & [Vladimir] Nabokov believe in many things, and these things emerge in their writing clearly - for Wilde, the folly of humankind and the (romantic) grandeur of the heroic, lone individual (not unlike Wilde himself); for Nabokov, the possibility of a kind of transcendence through a great, prevailing, superior sort of love (especially in Ada, the most self-congratulatory of novels.)

Joyce Carol Oates

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it.

Elizabeth Strout

Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.

Jeff Vandermeer

Sometimes I just think of an image. Basically, I see an image in front of me. My eyes are open, but I visualize an image, very truthfully. It happened with all my movies the same way.

Juan Diego Solanas

Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.

Donald E. Westlake

Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how the mood gets in. It's good to subtly overdo it too, as Nabokov does, as Sebald does. It's a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel.

Teju Cole

The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet.

Mary Higgins Clark

There is no God separate from you, no God higher than you, the real "you." All the gods are little beings to you, all the ideas of God and Father in heaven are but your own reflection. God Himself is your image. “God created man after His own image." That is wrong. Man creates God after his own image. That is right. Throughout the universe we are creating gods after our own image. We create the god and fall down at his feet and worship him; and when this dream comes, we love it !

Swami Vivekananda

'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov was bloody hard work but really thrilling.

Domhnall Gleeson

If you see an image and it's just an image, and there's a bad link or no description, and you don't know what that image is, or who took it, or what it's a picture of, it's not a very satisfying or actionable experience.

Evan Sharp

Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.

Dean Koontz

You come to the photograph as an aesthetic object with no context... Then you step in and read the text and then out again to revisit the image in a completely different way. I'm interested in that space between text and image. The piece becomes the negative space between the two.

Taryn Simon

The book, the idea of a book or the image of a book, is a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge.. I make my own books to find my way through the old stories.

Anselm Kiefer

For a Nabokov fan, paging through 'Fine Lines,' which includes a critical introduction and several essayistic evaluations of Nabokov's scientific oeuvre, can feel a bit like reading the second half of 'Pale Fire': one is confronted by a content-rich, almost dementedly tangential commentary on an increasingly inscrutable work.

Elif Batuman

A Quote by Samantha Hunt

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