Ink, a Drug. - Vladimir Nabokov

What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.

There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.