Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (137 Quotes)

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.

Let me repeat with quite force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow moving tall, with dark soft hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour.

There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.

All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.

I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with

Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.

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.

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.

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.