Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

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

I confess, I do not believe in time.

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.

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

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

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.

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.

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.

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.