Nabokov Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Nabokov
Nabokov Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Nabokov quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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