“What on earth is an artist?”

Van Veen is speaking with a “fellow student whom we shall call Dick,” Dick Cheshire:


Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969).

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[Underground observatories were proposed as early as 1903. The Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events has an oddly Nabokovian name.]