Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.

Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.

And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods. . .

Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity

Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.

My answer to your question'Does the writer have a social responsibility?' is NO.You owe me ten cents, sir.

We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

Memory overshadows the present and dims the future "into something thicker than its usual pea soup."

Do those clowns really believe what they teach?

I think she always nursed a small mad hope.

Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?

for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.

In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.

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

Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.

Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

My little cup brims with tiddles.

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

There was no Lo to behold.

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.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.

Solitude was corrupting me.

I think it is all a matter of love.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.

Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.

To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.

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.

...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.

Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?

All great novels are great fairy tales.

Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.

Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.

Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.

She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.

Her lips were like large crimson polyps.

Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

An active and creative reader is a re-reader.

My characters are galley slaves.