Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

You have to be an artist and a madman...

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

Dear Jesus, do something.

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

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

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

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

Religion is boring and alien to me and relates no more than a chimera to what is to me the reality of the spirit.

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

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.

(T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.

The square root of I is I.

Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

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

Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

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

I dreamt of you last night - as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

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

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.

Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

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

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

...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....

In this very special self-hypnotic state there can be no question of getting out of touch with on[e]self and floating into a normal sleep (unless you are very tired at the start)

Everything he said should be followed by a big sic

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

Coordinating thereEvents and objects with remote eventsAnd vanished objects. Making ornamentsOf accidents and possibilities.

Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.

Ink, a Drug.

... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too

No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze...

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

The lost glove is happy.

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

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