Vladimir Nabokov Quotes on Art (6 Quotes)

It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art.

I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. ...I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

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.

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

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

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.