Famous Vladimir Nabokov Quotations

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"Solitude is the playfield of Satan."
by Vladimir Nabokov
"My loathings are simple stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
by Vladimir Nabokov
"A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader."
by Vladimir Nabokov
"I have never seen a more lucid, better balanced, mad mind than mine."
by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"I think it is all a matter of love the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."
by Vladimir Nabokov
"It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow."
by Vladimir Nabokov
"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
by Vladimir Nabokov
"There is only one school of literature - that of talent."
by Vladimir Nabokov
"Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?"
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
"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
"Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash."
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
"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
"It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot."
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
"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
"Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them."
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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"Darling, you know, I have a most ambitious fantasy."
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
"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
"Let us wait for the page proof."
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
"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
"That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood."
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
"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 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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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


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