Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

My whole life has been a lie.

That is a strange phenomenon, people pretending to be other people.

How do you tell someone that you weren't the person he thought you were? And more importantly, how did you tell him that you'd meant the things you'd said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie.

I am myself a fabulous fake.

I've been living a lie all my life.

I wanted to be left alone to live my life, so it was very easy for people to pretend that they were me.

I feel like a fraud... My name is not even actually Ashton. Ashton is my middle name.

I could easily not be the person that people know.

Putting somebody else's pants on and pretending to be somebody else is occasionally, as you grow older, horrifying.

In the world of the Internet, there are many falsehoods. Anyone can write stuff on Wikipedia, and it doesn't have to be true.

The most bizarre thing I've ever read about myself is that I was dead. That was kind of weird to read that I'm dead - mostly because I was reading it.

I was living a life of a lie, I really was.

From a conspiratorial point of view things could not have been better. No identification documents were needed in London, and one could register under any name.

There are a lot of people who don't know me and what I am all about.

That image of who I was publicly was so solidified. You're that person. And it wasn't even close to a true representation of where I was in my life.

I have serious, serious problems with personas - with unauthentic individuals.

We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.

Everything about it was false. Right then, in that office, with the realization that no one knew the truth about my life, my thoughts about the world were shaken.

You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest.

I may have implied on several occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven't decided yet what I am or who I am.

Take the particular trick of false names. It seems to us particularly odious. We think when we show our contempt for those who use this subterfuge that we are giving them no more than they deserve. It is a meanness which we associate with criminals and vagabonds; a piece of crawling and sneaking...Men whose race is universally known, will unblushingly adopt a false name as a mask, and after a year or two pretend to treat it as an insult if their original and true name be used in its place.

You’ve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really it’s about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to what’s real. -Going Bovine

When you lie about your age, the terrorists win.

That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted.

Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume.