Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Vladimir Nabokov Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Vladimir Nabokov quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Vladimir Nabokov. Share these quotations with your friends and family.

Whether or not his newspaper and a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called 'real life' of the so- called average m...

By Vladimir Nabokov
We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study tha...

By Vladimir Nabokov
To a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of consciousness—which again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to be...

By Vladimir Nabokov
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.

By Vladimir Nabokov
Today one does not hear much about him.... The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will...

By Vladimir Nabokov
The wedding was a quiet affair, and when called upon to enjoy my promotion from lodger to lover did I experience only bitterness and distaste?...

By Vladimir Nabokov
The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he unde...

By Vladimir Nabokov
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...

By Vladimir Nabokov
That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.

By Vladimir Nabokov
One way to do it might be by making the scenery penetrate the automobile. A polished black sedan was a good subject, especially if parked at t...

By Vladimir Nabokov
Leonid Ivanovich Shigaev is dead.... The suspension dots, customary in Russian obituaries, must represent the footprints of words that have de...

By Vladimir Nabokov
Let us wait for the page proof.

By Vladimir Nabokov
In this lucid and flexible pattern only one thing remained always stationary, but this fallacy went unnoticed by Martha. The blind spot was th...

By Vladimir Nabokov
I never meant to deny the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent in every genuine work of art. What I do deny and am prepared to figh...

By Vladimir Nabokov
Darling, you know, I have a most ambitious fantasy.

By Vladimir Nabokov
Attainment and science, retainment and art—the two couples keep to themselves, but when they do meet, nothing else in the world matters.

By Vladimir Nabokov
Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, rev...

By Vladimir Nabokov
Among the many gifts I showered on Martin, I was careful not to include talent. How easy it would have been to make him an artist, a writer; h...

By Vladimir Nabokov
And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris wi...

By Vladimir Nabokov
And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have...

By Vladimir Nabokov
Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

By Vladimir Nabokov
Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known... this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.

By 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.

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

By Vladimir Nabokov
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

By Vladimir Nabokov
Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both Rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky

By Vladimir Nabokov
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

By Vladimir Nabokov
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

By Vladimir Nabokov
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.

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

By Vladimir Nabokov