Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov

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.

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

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

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.

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

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

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.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

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

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

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

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

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

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

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.

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.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.