Look at the Harlequins!

Is there not a nice special word for a pigling? ("I am toying with 'snork,' said Professor Noteboke, the best translator of Gogol's immortal The Carrick.)

He was one of those persons who for some reason or other are often interrupted, but whom no force in our blessed galaxy will prevent from completing their sentence, despite terrible new interruptions, of an elemental or poetical nature, the death of the interlocutor ("I was just saying to him, doctor--"), or the entrance of a dragon.

(Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!, 1974)

I'd probably read a half-dozen other Nabokov books before I got to Look at the Harlequins!  It must be a completely different reading experience for someone unfamiliar with his other fiction or a rough outline of his biography.

Until I stumbled across these quotations again, recently, I didn't recall how amusing it was. Its excorciating sarcasm regarding the folly of "reading" an author through his fiction is what really stuck in my mind.