Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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]
Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
The Goldsworth castle became particularly solitary after that turning point at dusk which resembles so much the nightfall of the mind. Stealthy
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.
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.
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
The red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher,
...My taut heart
lurches heavily, like a sack in a cart, clattering
downhill, towards a cliff, towards an abyss!
It can't be stopped!
lurches heavily, like a sack in a cart, clattering
downhill, towards a cliff, towards an abyss!
It can't be stopped!
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.
Making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in natural bower of aspens xliC mujzikml.
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
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.
Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams.
I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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.
She could fade and wither- I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her.
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,
[D]avid began to argue, with the whining intonations of German astonishment, [ ... ] that everyone did it.
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 ...
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.
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.