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.

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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.