> To avoid speaking like a child in public, Nabokov took great pains to prepare his every word. "Throughout my academic ascent in America from lean lecturer to Full Professor, I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand and not held under my eyes on the bright-lit lectern."
> When it came to giving interviews, Nabokov was horrified by the notion of sitting back and having a casual chat with a reporter. "It has been tried at least twice in the old days," he writes, "and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance. Nowadays I take every precaution to ensure a dignified beat of the mandarin's fan. The interviewer's questions have to be sent to me in writing, answered by me in writing, and reproduced verbatim. Such are the three absolute conditions."
> So the excerpt above from a 1969 interview with the British journalist James Mossman should be understood as a carefully prepared performance.
Note how in the interview you posted, he frequently gets stuck on his prepared lines, resulting in sequences like or-or-or-or-or-or or the-the-the-the-the. (Yes, disfluencies are common in all speakers. But those disfluencies are not typical of English speakers, and reflect a different problem.)
> To avoid speaking like a child in public, Nabokov took great pains to prepare his every word. "Throughout my academic ascent in America from lean lecturer to Full Professor, I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand and not held under my eyes on the bright-lit lectern."
> When it came to giving interviews, Nabokov was horrified by the notion of sitting back and having a casual chat with a reporter. "It has been tried at least twice in the old days," he writes, "and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance. Nowadays I take every precaution to ensure a dignified beat of the mandarin's fan. The interviewer's questions have to be sent to me in writing, answered by me in writing, and reproduced verbatim. Such are the three absolute conditions."
> So the excerpt above from a 1969 interview with the British journalist James Mossman should be understood as a carefully prepared performance.
Note how in the interview you posted, he frequently gets stuck on his prepared lines, resulting in sequences like or-or-or-or-or-or or the-the-the-the-the. (Yes, disfluencies are common in all speakers. But those disfluencies are not typical of English speakers, and reflect a different problem.)