Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (137 Quotes)

Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.

If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look.

Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.

There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.

I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita.

Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.

While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.

We are most artistically caged.

Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.

I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own.

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.

Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.

And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.

And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.

But in my arms she was always Lolita.

By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.

Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise.

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.

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

Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac) and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ''nymphets.''

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

Poor Knight he really had two periods, the first - a dull man writing broken English, the second - a broken man writing dull English.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.

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

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

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