My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, by anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses-- the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions-- which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.
-Vladimir Nabokov, in the afterward to Lolita