Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

» I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

» The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

» I confess, I do not believe in time.

» Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

» You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

» My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

» Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

» There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

» The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

» It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

» A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

» Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

» Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

» Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

» The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

» Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

» Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

» Caress the detail, the divine detail.

» There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

» Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

» Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

» A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

» Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

» Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

» I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

» A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

» It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

» To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

» It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

» Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

» There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

» I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

» The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

» A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

» All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

» Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.

» No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

» Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.

» I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.

» Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

» Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

» I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

» The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

» The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

» Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

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