Nabokov Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Nabokov

Nabokov Quotes & Sayings

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Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation. — Vladimir Nabokov

Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional. — Vladimir Nabokov

With your little claws, Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look. — Vladimir Nabokov

Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are. — Vladimir Nabokov

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French. — Vladimir Nabokov

There is nothing so banal in the world,' said Ada 'than pitching stones at a hawfinch. — Vladimir Nabokov

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov. — David Lipsky

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir! — Amity Gaige

Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This — Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution. — Vladimir Nabokov

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. — Vladimir Nabokov

Life is a message scribbled in the dark. — Vladimir Nabokov

Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I — Vladimir Nabokov

Genius is finding the invisible link between things. — Vladimir Nabokov

I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me. — Vladimir Nabokov

I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine. — Vladimir Nabokov

Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk. — Vladimir Nabokov

Plage, various seaside chairs and stools supported the parents — Vladimir Nabokov

I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else. — Vladimir Nabokov

All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born. — Vladimir Nabokov

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know. — Vladimir Nabokov

A shoe-shaped bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no white-necked maiden to stab me. — Vladimir Nabokov

Living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement. — Vladimir Nabokov

O my Carmen, my Carmen!
Something, something those something nights
And the stars, and the cars, and the bars and the barmen ~ — Vladimir Nabokov

What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape. — Vladimir Nabokov

There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone. — Vladimir Nabokov

To the Winds, Victor was a problem child insofar as he refused to be one. — Vladimir Nabokov

That is his head, containing a brain of a different brand than that of the synthetic jellies preserved in the skulls around him — Vladimir Nabokov

I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me. — Vladimir Nabokov

The evolution of sense, in a sense, is the evolution of non sense — Vladimir Nabokov

I had possessed her - and she never knew it. — Vladimir Nabokov

Q: What is the best thing men do? A: To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless. — Vladimir Nabokov

The determinate scheme by stripping the sunrise of it's surprise would erase all sunrays. — Vladimir Nabokov

Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer-so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible. — Tom Bissell

It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really. — Vladimir Nabokov

The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her — Vladimir Nabokov

While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space,
the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. — Vladimir Nabokov

No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke. — Vladimir Nabokov

No wonder tobacco shops have a predilection for corners, for — Vladimir Nabokov

Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon — Vladimir Nabokov

A bowling ball rolled through his head, diagonally from nape to temple; it paused and started back. — Vladimir Nabokov

The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony. — Vladimir Nabokov

For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word. — Vladimir Nabokov

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading — Vladimir Nabokov

It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color. — Vladimir Nabokov

I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them. — Vladimir Nabokov

How can I write about this when I am afraid of not having time to finish and of stirring up all these thoughts in vain? — Vladimir Nabokov

A wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apologetic salaams. — Vladimir Nabokov

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life. — Vladimir Nabokov

(hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed) ... — Vladimir Nabokov

The one who kills is always his victim's inferior. — Vladimir Nabokov

For she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum. — Vladimir Nabokov

Glancing sideways, he said that he loved her. Then, turning rapidly, he walked away and entered a tobacco shop. — Vladimir Nabokov

I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash. — Vladimir Nabokov

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

Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality - the deception was bearable. — Vladimir Nabokov

Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams. — Vladimir Nabokov

Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world. — Vladimir Nabokov

The compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. — Vladimir Nabokov

The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. — Vladimir Nabokov

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. — Vladimir Nabokov

I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows. — Vladimir Nabokov

(T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time. — Vladimir Nabokov

Nymphets do not occur in polar regions. — Vladimir Nabokov

You are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought ... — Vladimir Nabokov

If his Russian was music, his English was murder. — Vladimir Nabokov

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory. — Vladimir Nabokov

She could fade and wither- I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her. — Vladimir Nabokov

A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor. — Vladimir Nabokov

The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition — Vladimir Nabokov

How can I demonstrate [ ... ] that I have glimpsed somebody's future recollection? — Vladimir Nabokov

Words without experience are meaningless. — Vladimir Nabokov

Zembla is a site devoted to the life and works of author, translator, and lepidopterist. — Vladimir Nabokov

A person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time. — Vladimir Nabokov

Blue!' she exclaimed. 'Violet blue. What are they made of?' 'Summer skies,' I said, 'and plums and figs, and the grape-blood of emperors.' 'No, — Vladimir Nabokov

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. — John Updike

You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere. — Vladimir Nabokov

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past. — Vladimir Nabokov

Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy. — Vladimir Nabokov

What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness
that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being. — Vladimir Nabokov

We think not in words but in shadows of words. — Vladimir Nabokov

Be true to your Dick. — Vladimir Nabokov

this summer is so much sadder than the other — Vladimir Nabokov

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. — Vladimir Nabokov

What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion? — Vladimir Nabokov

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world's muteness. — Vladimir Nabokov

And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection. — Vladimir Nabokov

Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity. — Vladimir Nabokov

twirling in his fingers the mummy of a cigar, — Vladimir Nabokov

The isms go, the ist dies, art remains — Vladimir Nabokov

I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. — Vladimir Nabokov

I confess, I do not believe in time. — Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer. — Stacy Schiff

And the rest is rust and stardust. — Vladimir Nabokov

All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs. — Vladimir Nabokov

I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze. — Vladimir Nabokov

While you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away. — Vladimir Nabokov

There are certain trifles I do not forgive. Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot. - John Shade — Vladimir Nabokov

There is only one school of literature - that of talent. — Vladimir Nabokov