Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

"Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Nothing, Past)

"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."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Being, Feeling, Words)

"No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has."
- Vladimir Nabokov

"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Music, Crime, Cruelty, Oppression, Stupidity)

"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Butterflies, Literature, Man)

"Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Death, Life)

"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
(Related: Dreams, Genius, African, Pity, Snow)

"It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Nature, War, Detail, states)

"It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot."
- Vladimir Nabokov

"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."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Imagination, Life, Delight, Order)

"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Time, Effort, Reading)

"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Genius)

"I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Mind, Right)

"I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Past, World)

"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
(Related: Home, Past, Present)

"I confess, I do not believe in time."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Time)

"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Poetry, Words)

"Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Love, Work, Fiction)

"Genius is an African who dreams up snow."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Dreams, Genius, African, Snow)

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Existence)

"Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Class)

"Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Being, Mind, State)

"Caress the detail, the divine detail."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Detail)

"All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Blush, First, Style)

"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Imagination, Writer)

"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Art, Work, Society, Importance)

"I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Love, Memory)

"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
(Related: Mind)

"Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Revolution)

"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
(Related: Painting)

"To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Art, Power, Magic, Play)

"There is only one school of literature - that of talent."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Talent, Literature, School)

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Fancy, Prose, Style)

"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."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Mediocrity, Nothing, World)

"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."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Mind)

"There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Airplanes, Aphorisms)

"Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Nothing, Vulgarity)

"Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: People, Harm, Hate)

"Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Satire)

"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."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Common sense, Darkness, Existence, Light)

"The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Sea)

"Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Ideas, Style)

"The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Evolution, Nonsense)