Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Religion is boring and alien to me and relates no more than a chimera to what is to me the reality of the spirit.

Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.

I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.

I think it is all a matter of love the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

You have to be an artist and a madman...

Light in comparison with darkness is a void.

We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.

Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze...

- A sentyment staje się uciążliwy. W końcu jest coś nazbyt fizycznego w próbie zachowania cząstki dzieciństwa na swoim mostku. - Nie pan pierwszy sprowadza wiarę do zmysłu dotyku.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

Ink, a Drug.

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.

A thousand years ago five minutes wereEqual to forty ounces of fine sand.Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime andInfinite aftertime: above your headThey close like giant wings, and you are dead.

His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.

(T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.

I dreamt of you last night - as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.

But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?

as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

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...

She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.

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

His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference b

... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

[S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.

The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can.

We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.

I had possessed her - and she never knew it.

The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy

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

Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight

...for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.

He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

...I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book....

He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.

You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.

In this very special self-hypnotic state there can be no question of getting out of touch with on[e]self and floating into a normal sleep (unless you are very tired at the start)

Everything he said should be followed by a big sic

All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort.

I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.