Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

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.

It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

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

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

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

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

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.

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

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

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

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