Top 100 Quotes About Nabokov
#1. 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
#2. Nabokov complained he was afflicted with total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.
Stacy Schiff
#3. I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.
Steve Erickson
#4. 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
#5. Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.
David Lipsky
#6. Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
John Updike
#7. 'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov was bloody hard work but really thrilling.
Domhnall Gleeson
#8. 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
#9. There was something, both in fiction and in his life (Nabokov), that we instinctively related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away.
I could invent violin or be devoured by the void.
Azar Nafisi
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.
Zadie Smith
#13. Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov - writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.
Jeff VanderMeer
#14. I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers - not all of them, of course.
James Salter
#15. [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
#16. We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.
Azar Nafisi
#17. I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
Zadie Smith
#18. 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
#19. Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.
Edward Abbey
#20. Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.
Donald E. Westlake
#21. Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.
Corey Robin
#22. Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who "identified" with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist.
Joseph Epstein
#23. 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
#24. 'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it.
Elizabeth Strout
#25. Poshlust, Nabokov explains, is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.
Azar Nafisi
#26. Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of controversy, was an author who never gave up.
Ashwin Sanghi
#27. Writing of Pushkin, Nabokov once observed quite accurately that his subject was the threefold formula of human life: the irretrievability of the past, the insatiability of the present, and the unforeseeability of the future.
Brian Boyd
#28. 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
#29. Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!
Amity Gaige
#30. Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
Dean Koontz
#31. Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.
Lorrie Moore
#32. Nabokov changed my life," Max said. "I was going to be a writer, and then I read Lolita and I decided to go to law school instead. It looked easier.
Leslie Daniels
#33. I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. - Vladimir Nabokov
Jodi Picoult
#34. Among more recent innovators was the Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov, whose novel Bend Sinister is trophied with delightful oddities like kwazinka ('a slit between the folding parts of a screen') and shchekotiki (which is 'half-tingle, half-tickle').6
Henry Hitchings
#35. According to Ruth, Nabokov changed the way she read and wrote: "He used words to paint pictures. Even today, when I read, I notice with pleasure when an author has chosen a particular word, a particular place, for the picture it will convey to the reader." Ruth remembers
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#36. Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer-so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.
Tom Bissell
#37. 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
#38. 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, Speak, Memory: A Memoir
Sheldon Solomon
#39. As a general rule, highly rational writers (like Nabokov) write most comfortably in the morning, and mainly intuitive writers write most comfortably at night.
John Gardner
#40. ( ... ) 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
#41. The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.
Vladimir Nabokov
#43. I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
Vladimir Nabokov
#44. I am here through an error - not in this prison, specifically - but in this whole terrible, striped world;
Vladimir Nabokov
#45. 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
#46. Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!
Vladimir Nabokov
#47. I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do god and devil combine to form a live dog?
Vladimir Nabokov
#48. I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.
Vladimir Nabokov
#49. It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle,
Vladimir Nabokov
#50. In the first act get your principal character up a tree; in the second act, throw stones at him; in the third, get him down gracefully.
Anonymous
#51. [S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.
Vladimir Nabokov
#52. I notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.
Vladimir Nabokov
#53. Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
Vladimir Nabokov
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement.
Vladimir Nabokov
#57. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov
#58. Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's Dead Souls.
Vladimir Nabokov
#59. For did it not mean I was losing my darling, just when I had secretly made her mine?
Vladimir Nabokov
#61. All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
Vladimir Nabokov
#62. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
Vladimir Nabokov
#63. Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
Vladimir Nabokov
#65. Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths - until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
Vladimir Nabokov
#66. Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov
#67. Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.
Vladimir Nabokov
#68. What are these hopes, and who is this savior?" "Imagination," replied Cincinnatus.
Vladimir Nabokov
#69. 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
#70. And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.
Vladimir Nabokov
#71. Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,
Of hate and remorse I'm dying.
And again my hairy fist I raise,
And again I hear you crying.
Vladimir Nabokov
#72. 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
#73. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
#74. And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy
Vladimir Nabokov
#75. Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.
Vladimir Nabokov
#77. 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
#78. Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams.
Vladimir Nabokov
#79. As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.
Vladimir Nabokov
#80. Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
#81. 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
#83. Thus the story describes a full circle ... a vicious circle as all circles are, despite their posing as apples, or planets, or human faces.
Vladimir Nabokov
#84. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
Vladimir Nabokov
#85. Making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in natural bower of aspens xliC mujzikml.
Vladimir Nabokov
#86. Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
Vladimir Nabokov
#87. A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
Vladimir Nabokov
#88. 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
#89. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.
Vladimir Nabokov
#94. I'm walking out now into the soft light, the cooling him of evening, and I will love you tonight, and tomorrow, and still many more, so very many tomorrows.
Vladimir Nabokov
#95. Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
Vladimir Nabokov
#96. In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
Vladimir Nabokov
#97. Religion is boring and alien to me and relates no more than a chimera to what is to me the reality of the spirit.
Vladimir Nabokov
#98. She had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.
Vladimir Nabokov
#100. His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.
Vladimir Nabokov
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