Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

I'm certainly not shy, but I like playing it because I love those characters that are incredibly confident but really still a mess.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

Hey Rid?" She stopped and turned to look at him, almost ruefully. Like she couldn't help what she was any more then a shark could help being a shark, but if she could... "Yeah, Shrinky Dink?" "You're not all bad." She looked right at him and almost smiled. "You know what they say. Maybe I'm just drawn that way.

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.

I'm a combination between extreme insecurity and extreme confidence.

Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.

I'm not a pitiable creature. It's just that I suffer very eloquently.

No matter how I look, the freak inside me leaks out.

A lot of times when I'm writing lyrics, I just think about insecurities that I might have and turn them into a scene. Some things may be true, and some things may not.

As hard as I try to sound tough and dark, I still sound cute.

Complicated feelings are fertile soil for creative ideas.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. You're gay, you're sick, you're nervous or whatever.

Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do.

Yeah, well my name is Bai Ling. That means white spirit, and I really feel like sometimes I'm not existing.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

I'm crazy, but I'm serious. I'm sentimental, but I'm, like, really hard, too. I just want people to understand that I have all these sides inside me.

I'm a passionate person; there's a lot going on underneath my carousel of blazers: a cauldron of sensitivity and emotion.

I don't see myself as having a dark side.

I will confess that almost all my inspiration has come from one emotion: fear. And terrible dread of the moment when I will finally be exposed as a fraud.

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

What's often in your heart is the hardest to reach.

I like to think that I'm a really strong, tough person, but I'm not. I'm a very, very needy person. I'm very insecure. I'm very impressionable. But, there is a side of me that is very put-together, very strong, very capable and very opinionated. It's the two sides of myself.

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.

I did not succeed in everything I did. And even where it did seem I was succeeding it was not always the case. The human heart has a million facets.