Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

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.

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 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.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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