Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

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

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.

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 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.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

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.

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.

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

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