Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

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

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!

Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.

Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.

Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?

It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.

There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

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

Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

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

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

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

We are most artistically caged.

Dear Jesus, do something.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.

Genius is finding the invisible link between things.