Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.

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

Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

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

Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.

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

Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.

All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.

Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.

Words without experience are meaningless.

Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.

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

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

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.

I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.

Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?

I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.

In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.

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

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.

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

It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.

... my mind lay limp in an empty world.

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.

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.

I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.

The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

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

Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.

My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.

I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling

I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.

Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.

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