Top 100 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
#1. ( ... ) after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure ( ... )
Vladimir Nabokov
#2. The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.
Vladimir Nabokov
#4. It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle,
Vladimir Nabokov
#5. I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had.
Vladimir Nabokov
#6. For did it not mean I was losing my darling, just when I had secretly made her mine?
Vladimir Nabokov
#8. All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
Vladimir Nabokov
#9. This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.
Vladimir Nabokov
#10. Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
Vladimir Nabokov
#11. When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - "hoping that I like the book as much as he does" - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.
Vladimir Nabokov
#12. Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past
Vladimir Nabokov
#13. When I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool
Vladimir Nabokov
#14. Oh," said Haze, "poor me should know, I went through that when I was a kid: boys twisting one's hair, hurting one's breasts, flipping one's skirt.
Vladimir Nabokov
#15. In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes [ ... ], sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose- and that not owning to some blessed pill or potion [ ... ] or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug.
Vladimir Nabokov
#16. Sometimes, though, angels smoke-in their sleeves. But when the archangel goes by, they throw their cigarettes away: This is what falling stars are.
Vladimir Nabokov
#17. In a livid wet dress, under the tumbling mist ... had run ecstatically up that ridge above Moulinet to be felled there by a thunderbolt.
Vladimir Nabokov
#18. I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
Vladimir Nabokov
#19. I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
Vladimir Nabokov
#20. It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.
Vladimir Nabokov
#21. No you can't take a pistol and plug a girl you don't even know simply because she attracts you.
Vladimir Nabokov
#22. 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.
Vladimir Nabokov
#23. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
Vladimir Nabokov
#24. for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling!
Vladimir Nabokov
#26. I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling
Vladimir Nabokov
#27. Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man's fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thug in New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat of their Timekeeper's stopwatch.
Vladimir Nabokov
#28. Being mad, he failed to take into account the scheming of irresponsible politicians. Being mad, he believed that other governments would act in accordance with the principles of mercy and common sense.
Vladimir Nabokov
#29. Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
Vladimir Nabokov
#30. While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space,
the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Vladimir Nabokov
#33. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
Vladimir Nabokov
#34. I moved on, and at noon, dragging through some village, I decided to halt, since even at such
Vladimir Nabokov
#35. My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
Vladimir Nabokov
#36. I dreamt of you last night - as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.
Vladimir Nabokov
#38. The hoary judge put his mouth close to his ear, panted for a moment, made the announcement and slowly moved away, as though ungluing himself.
Vladimir Nabokov
#39. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel - and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.
Vladimir Nabokov
#40. The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
Vladimir Nabokov
#41. Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
Vladimir Nabokov
#42. Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought - and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.
Vladimir Nabokov
#43. For the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
Vladimir Nabokov
#44. We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.
Vladimir Nabokov
#45. The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.
Vladimir Nabokov
#46. When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet.
Vladimir Nabokov
#47. There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
Vladimir Nabokov
#48. Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality - the deception was bearable.
Vladimir Nabokov
#49. The two lads were told to wash their hands. The recent thrill of adventure had been superseded by another sort of excitement. They locked themselves up. The tap ran unheeded. Both were in a manly state and moaning like doves.
Vladimir Nabokov
#50. I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair.
Vladimir Nabokov
#51. Where, where ... " M'sieur Pierre mimicked him. "You know where. Off to do chop-chop.
Vladimir Nabokov
#52. Humbert the Terrible deliberated with Humbert the Small whether Humbert Humbert should kill her or her lover, or both, or neither.
Vladimir Nabokov
#53. He groped for and cupped her hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy's sandcastle- molding position; but she turned over, naively ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo.
Vladimir Nabokov
#54. The cup-sized breasts of that twenty-four year old impatient beauty seemed a dozen years younger than she, with those pale squinty nipples and firm form.
Vladimir Nabokov
#55. Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear.
Vladimir Nabokov
#56. The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
Vladimir Nabokov
#57. If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.
Vladimir Nabokov
#58. Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
Vladimir Nabokov
#59. The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]
Vladimir Nabokov
#60. I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. ... Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
Vladimir Nabokov
#61. There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
Vladimir Nabokov
#62. If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subdued, frightened-to-death rocking chair, before I drove to wherever the beast's lair was - and then pulled the pistol's foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger.
Vladimir Nabokov
#63. Ada girl, adored girl, [ ... ] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.
Vladimir Nabokov
#64. It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
Vladimir Nabokov
#68. If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.
Vladimir Nabokov
#69. The Girl Scout's motto is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as - well, never mind what. My duty is - to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I am cheerful. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word, and deed.
Vladimir Nabokov
#70. Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun.
Vladimir Nabokov
#71. Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet
Age: five thousand three hundred days.
Vladimir Nabokov
#72. Years of secret suffering had taught me superhuman self-control.
Vladimir Nabokov
#73. Fame in our day is too common to be confused with the enduring glow around the deserving book.
Vladimir Nabokov
#74. If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look.
Vladimir Nabokov
#75. Death," he had said on another occasion, "seems to be merely a bad habit, which nature is at present powerless to overcome.
Vladimir Nabokov
#76. I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me.
Vladimir Nabokov
#77. Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.
Vladimir Nabokov
#78. You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.
Vladimir Nabokov
#81. Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.
Vladimir Nabokov
#82. One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist.
Vladimir Nabokov
#84. 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 ...
Vladimir Nabokov
#87. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane ...
Vladimir Nabokov
#88. The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave', as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.
Vladimir Nabokov
#89. It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.
Vladimir Nabokov
#90. When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.
Vladimir Nabokov
#91. 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.
Vladimir Nabokov
#92. The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her
Vladimir Nabokov
#93. Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
Vladimir Nabokov
#94. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.
Vladimir Nabokov
#95. There was a rhythm, an
alternation in the dripping that I found as teasing as a coin
trick.
Vladimir Nabokov
#98. Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.
Vladimir Nabokov
#99. The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony.
Vladimir Nabokov
#100. And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:
...Beneath the sky
Of my America to sigh
For one locality in Russia.
(a passage not for 'general readers' but for 'idiots')
Vladimir Nabokov
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