Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
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.
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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.
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.
Darling, you know, I have a most ambitious fantasy.
I never meant to deny the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent in every genuine work of art. What I do deny and am prepared to figh...
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.
In this lucid and flexible pattern only one thing remained always stationary, but this fallacy went unnoticed by Martha. The blind spot was th...
Attainment and science, retainment and art—the two couples keep to themselves, but when they do meet, nothing else in the world matters.
And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris wi...
We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study tha...
Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, rev...
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...
One way to do it might be by making the scenery penetrate the automobile. A polished black sedan was a good subject, especially if parked at t...
Leonid Ivanovich Shigaev is dead.... The suspension dots, customary in Russian obituaries, must represent the footprints of words that have de...
The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he unde...
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
The wedding was a quiet affair, and when called upon to enjoy my promotion from lodger to lover did I experience only bitterness and distaste?...
Among the many gifts I showered on Martin, I was careful not to include talent. How easy it would have been to make him an artist, a writer; h...
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
Today one does not hear much about him.... The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will...
My loathings are simple stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have...
