Nabokov's Quotes
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Nabokov's 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
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
The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]
— Vladimir Nabokov
There is nothing so banal in the world,' said Ada 'than pitching stones at a hawfinch.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!
— Amity Gaige
Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Dostoevski's The Double is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's Nose.
— Vladimir Nabokov
He began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov
— Vladimir Nabokov
I am ready to give you all of my blood, if I had to - it's hard to explain - sounds flat - but that's how it is.
— 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
![Nabokov's Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov: [S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/nabokovs-quotes-by-vladimir-nabokov-2150493.jpg "Nabokov's Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov: [S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with")
[S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.
— Vladimir Nabokov
I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
— 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
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
— Vladimir Nabokov
![Nabokov's Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov: Man's life as commentary to abstruse [940] Unfinished](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/nabokovs-quotes-by-vladimir-nabokov-1711320.jpg "Nabokov's Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov: Man's life as commentary to abstruse [940] Unfinished")
Man's life as commentary to abstruse [940] Unfinished poem. Note for further use. Dressing
— 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
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 more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
— Vladimir Nabokov
It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color.
— Vladimir Nabokov
The one who kills is always his victim's inferior.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality - the deception was bearable.
— 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
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
The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony.
— Vladimir Nabokov
A bowling ball rolled through his head, diagonally from nape to temple; it paused and started back.
— Vladimir Nabokov
No wonder tobacco shops have a predilection for corners, for
— Vladimir Nabokov
... with somebody's lost pair of sun-glasses for only witness.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Death often is the point of life's joke.
— Vladimir Nabokov
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
— Vladimir Nabokov
And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus.
— Vladimir Nabokov
In life, as in chess, it is always better to analyze one's motives and intentions.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's Dead Souls.
— Vladimir Nabokov
One is always at home in one's past...
— Vladimir Nabokov
Only experts, for experts, should probe a mind's misery.
— Vladimir Nabokov
It is fun to be present at the coming true of a dream, even if it is not one's own.
— Vladimir Nabokov
The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort.
— Vladimir Nabokov
When I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool
— Vladimir Nabokov
Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Oh," said Haze, "poor me should know, I went through that when I was a kid: boys twisting one's hair, hurting one's breasts, flipping one's skirt.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.
— Lorrie Moore
Oh, Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?
— 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
![Nabokov's Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov: How can I demonstrate [ ... ] that](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/nabokovs-quotes-by-vladimir-nabokov-84247.jpg "Nabokov's Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov: How can I demonstrate [ ... ] that")
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
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
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