Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov

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.

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

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.

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 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.