quotes from classic

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

I confess, I do not believe in time.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

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

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

We want deeper sincerity of motive, a greater courage in speech and earnestness in action.

more quotes from Sarojini Naidu