Vladimir Nabokov quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Vladimir Nabokov on Wise Famous Quotes.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

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

'I shall vomit,' said Hugh, 'if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot.'

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.

Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.

My characters are galley slaves.

Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?

I moved on, and at noon, dragging through some village, I decided to halt, since even at such

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be a greater one.

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

I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.

We are most artistically caged.

The Goldsworth castle became particularly solitary after that turning point at dusk which resembles so much the nightfall of the mind. Stealthy

No Leslie, I'm not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

Leave your incidental Dick.

[S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.

One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.

The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle.

The mind writes with a pen, the heart, with a pencil.

The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.

If sex is the sermon made of art, love is the lady of that tower.

Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.

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

You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.

Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.

Do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation

The evolution of sense, in a sense, is the evolution of non sense

When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet.

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?

Fame in our day is too common to be confused with the enduring glow around the deserving book.

Light in comparison with darkness is a void.

If there is anything of which I am certain in life it is that I shall never exchange the liberty of my exile for the vile parody of home.

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy

Most of the dandelions had changed from suns into moons.

The red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher,

the awfulness of love and violets

...My taut heart
lurches heavily, like a sack in a cart, clattering
downhill, towards a cliff, towards an abyss!
It can't be stopped!

There was no Lo to behold.

beware of ideas...

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.

Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.

Making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in natural bower of aspens xliC mujzikml.

When you laugh, I want to transform the
entire world so it will mirror you.

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

There is only one school: that of talent.

The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun.

I really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything

Every great writer is a great deceiver

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

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

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

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

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

this summer is so much sadder than the other

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

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

twirling in his fingers the mummy of a cigar,

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

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.

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

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

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

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

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

Words without experience are meaningless.

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

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,

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

I have never seen a more lucid, better balanced, mad mind than mine.

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

[D]avid began to argue, with the whining intonations of German astonishment, [ ... ] that everyone did it.

As if it were a point of honor - which, indeed, a point of art often is.

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

I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book ...

My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.

We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a gynecologist feeling a tumor.

All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.

I, on my part, was as naive as only a pervert can be.

There was a rhythm, an
alternation in the dripping that I found as teasing as a coin
trick.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

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.

Who grins in official circumstances?

Actually he was a pessimist, and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man.

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

Thus the story describes a full circle ... a vicious circle as all circles are, despite their posing as apples, or planets, or human faces.

Years of secret suffering had taught me superhuman self-control.

At night, my dreams rhyme, and all day I have an aftertaste of insomnia.