Top 100 Nabokov's Quotes
#1. I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.
Michael Chabon
#2. [Nabokov's] language is made visible ... like a veil or transparent curtain. You cannot help seeing the curtain as you peek into the intimate rooms behind.
Jerzy Kosinski
#3. The biggest crime in Nabokov's 'Lolita' is imposing your own dream upon someone else's reality. Humbert Humbert is blind. He doesn't see Lolita's reality. He doesn't see that Lolita should leave. He only sees Lolita as an extension of his own obsession. This is what a totalitarian state does.
Azar Nafisi
#4. Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.
Lorrie Moore
#5. I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.
Marisha Pessl
#6. The class's favorite
book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates
Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his
originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law.
Azar Nafisi
#7. 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
#8. How can I demonstrate [ ... ] that I have glimpsed somebody's future recollection?
Vladimir Nabokov
#9. Dostoevski's The Double is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's Nose.
Vladimir Nabokov
#10. Paduk and all the rest wrote on steadily, but Krug's failure was complete, a baffling and hideous disaster, for he had been busy becoming an elderly man instead of learning the simple but now unobtainable passages which they, mere boys, had memorized.
Vladimir Nabokov
#11. Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how the mood gets in. It's good to subtly overdo it too, as Nabokov does, as Sebald does. It's a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel.
Teju Cole
#12. A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That's what I like about coincidence.
Vladimir Nabokov
#13. 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
#14. She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one's own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there
Vladimir Nabokov
#15. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.
Vladimir Nabokov
#16. Both were diverted by life's young fumblings,
both saddened by the wisdom of time
Vladimir Nabokov
#17. Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.
Vladimir Nabokov
#18. It is fun to be present at the coming true of a dream, even if it is not one's own.
Vladimir Nabokov
#19. I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.
Vladimir Nabokov
#20. 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
#21. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.
Vladimir Nabokov
#22. Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
Vladimir Nabokov
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce's
poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like
it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors
and ardors and Adas
Vladimir Nabokov
#26. 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
#27. Man's life as commentary to abstruse [940] Unfinished poem. Note for further use. Dressing
Vladimir Nabokov
#28. Where the devil did you get her?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: the weather is getting better."
"Seems so."
"Who's the lassie?"
"My daughter."
"You lie - she's not."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: July was hot.
Vladimir Nabokov
#29. In life, as in chess, it is always better to analyze one's motives and intentions.
Vladimir Nabokov
#30. The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
Vladimir Nabokov
#31. Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer's black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass!
Vladimir Nabokov
#33. He began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov
Vladimir Nabokov
#34. 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
#35. [T]his is how it will remain until ... literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity to admire itself. Only then will you be free to say what you please. [F]or God's sake stop that irrelevant chitchat.
Vladimir Nabokov
#36. Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
Vladimir Nabokov
#37. And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus.
Vladimir Nabokov
#38. It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color.
Vladimir Nabokov
#39. A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.
Vladimir Nabokov
#40. You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
Vladimir Nabokov
#41. Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.
Vladimir Nabokov
#42. Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m'imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. "Monsieur Poe-poe," as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classes in Paris called the poet-poet.
Vladimir Nabokov
#43. In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
Vladimir Nabokov
#44. That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born ...
Vladimir Nabokov
#45. At a very early stage of the novel's development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.
Vladimir Nabokov
#46. 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 ...
Vladimir Nabokov
#47. Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity - all this is difficult to admire.
Vladimir Nabokov
#48. The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.
Vladimir Nabokov
#49. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor's child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy.
Vladimir Nabokov
#50. Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.
Vladimir Nabokov
#52. I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'
Brian Eno
#53. 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
#54. 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!
Vladimir Nabokov
#55. The few times I said to myself anywhere: 'Now that's a nice spot for a permanent home,' I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth.
Vladimir Nabokov
#56. Both Erica and Liza Wind were morbidly concerned with heredity, and instead of delighting in Victor's artistic genius, they used to worry gloomily about its genetic cause.
Vladimir Nabokov
#57. Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.
Jeff VanderMeer
#58. Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father's maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk.
Vladimir Nabokov
#60. Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
Vladimir Nabokov
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. We all have such fateful objects
it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another
carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.
Vladimir Nabokov
#64. When a hypothesis enters a scientist's mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. It's plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is accepted as the true explanation for the given phenomenon, until someone finds its faults.
Vladimir Nabokov
#65. I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
Vladimir Nabokov
#66. If one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible.
Vladimir Nabokov
#67. Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?
Vladimir Nabokov
#68. Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's Dead Souls.
Vladimir Nabokov
#69. I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure
even when the velvety victim is locked up in one's dungeon
that some rival devil or influential god may still not abolish one's prepared triumph.
Vladimir Nabokov
#70. [S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.
Vladimir Nabokov
#71. It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art.
Vladimir Nabokov
#72. I am here through an error - not in this prison, specifically - but in this whole terrible, striped world;
Vladimir Nabokov
#73. I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
Vladimir Nabokov
#75. The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.
Vladimir Nabokov
#76. My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.
Jenny Offill
#77. ( ... ) 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
#78. The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort.
Vladimir Nabokov
#79. The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath.
Vladimir Nabokov
#80. Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality - the deception was bearable.
Vladimir Nabokov
#81. Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.
Vladimir Nabokov
#82. ... with somebody's lost pair of sun-glasses for only witness.
Vladimir Nabokov
#83. The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white church tower when I looked around me for the last time.
Vladimir Nabokov
#84. Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that's when you get shooting stars.
Vladimir Nabokov
#85. The determinate scheme by stripping the sunrise of it's surprise would erase all sunrays.
Vladimir Nabokov
#86. From my point of view, any outstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. Art is not just simple arithmetic, it's a delicate calculus. Keep in mind the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist.
Vladimir Nabokov
#87. I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world's muteness.
Vladimir Nabokov
#88. The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once said: In a Democracy, portraits of a nation's leader should never exceed the size of a postage stamp. That won't happen so quickly in Russia.
Vladimir Sorokin
#89. We sat and drank, each with a separate past locked up in him, and fate's alarm clocks set at unrelated futures
when, at last, a wrist was cocked, and eyes of consorts met.
Vladimir Nabokov
#90. From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.
Vladimir Nabokov
#91. Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise; And with a woman's smile and a child's care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.
Vladimir Nabokov
#93. I am ready to give you all of my blood, if I had to - it's hard to explain - sounds flat - but that's how it is.
Vladimir Nabokov
#94. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion.
Vladimir Nabokov
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Oh, Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?
Vladimir Nabokov
#98. Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
Vladimir Nabokov
#99. 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
#100. You came into my life-not as one comes to visit (you know, "not taking one's hat off") but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.
Vladimir Nabokov
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
