Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.

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

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.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust

One is always at home in one's past.

The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.

Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.

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

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.

Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.

I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.

Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.

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

The lost glove is happy.

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

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

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

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.

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

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

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

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

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.

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.

My own ultraviolet darling. " Lolita

I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.

There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.

The square root of I is I.

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.

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.

Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.

Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

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.

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

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.

...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.

Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.

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.

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

Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be