Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (137 Quotes)


    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.

    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.

    For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

    Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

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


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

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

    Against whom was it turned Against whom did he conspire Tum-tee-tum. And once more - TUM ... I have not gone mad. I am merely producing gleeful little sounds. The kind of glee one experiences upon making an April Fool of someone. And a damned good fool I have made of someone. Who is he Gentle reader, look at yourself in the mirror.

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

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

    She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms, she was always Lolita.

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

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

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

    Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known... this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.

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

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


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


    Knowing you'll have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

    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.


    Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

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

    Like so many ageing college people, Pnin had long ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus.

    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.

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


    Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra - these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known



    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.

    A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection

    Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts

    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.



    Related Authors


    Richard Bach - Miguel de Cervantes - Maxim Gorky - Jack Higgins - Honore de Balzac - Emily Bronte - Boris Pasternak - Anne Rice - Alexander Dumas - Aldous Huxley


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