Top 100 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov was bloody hard work but really thrilling.
Domhnall Gleeson
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who "identified" with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist.
Joseph Epstein
#6. '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
#7. 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
#8. Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
Dean Koontz
#9. I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. - Vladimir Nabokov
Jodi Picoult
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. ( ... ) 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
#13. The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.
Vladimir Nabokov
#15. I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
Vladimir Nabokov
#16. I am here through an error - not in this prison, specifically - but in this whole terrible, striped world;
Vladimir Nabokov
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.
Vladimir Nabokov
#21. It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle,
Vladimir Nabokov
#22. 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
#23. [S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.
Vladimir Nabokov
#24. 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
#25. Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
Vladimir Nabokov
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement.
Vladimir Nabokov
#29. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov
#30. Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's Dead Souls.
Vladimir Nabokov
#31. For did it not mean I was losing my darling, just when I had secretly made her mine?
Vladimir Nabokov
#33. All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
Vladimir Nabokov
#34. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
Vladimir Nabokov
#35. Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
Vladimir Nabokov
#37. 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
#38. Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov
#39. 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
#40. What are these hopes, and who is this savior?" "Imagination," replied Cincinnatus.
Vladimir Nabokov
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
#46. 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
#47. Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.
Vladimir Nabokov
#49. 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
#50. Tenderness rounds out true triumph, gentleness lubricates genuine liberation: emotions that are not diagnostic of glory or passion in dreams.
Vladimir Nabokov
#51. 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
#52. Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
Vladimir Nabokov
#57. Making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in natural bower of aspens xliC mujzikml.
Vladimir Nabokov
#58. Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
Vladimir Nabokov
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.
Vladimir Nabokov
#66. 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
#67. Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
Vladimir Nabokov
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. She had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.
Vladimir Nabokov
#72. His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.
Vladimir Nabokov
#73. (hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed) ...
Vladimir Nabokov
#74. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.
Vladimir Nabokov
#75. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.
Vladimir Nabokov
#76. I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world- nymphet love. (135)
Vladimir Nabokov
#77. Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times ... To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern ...
Vladimir Nabokov
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting
Vladimir Nabokov
#81. Actually he was a pessimist, and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man.
Vladimir Nabokov
#82. Beaming and melting in smiles of benevolence and self-effacement, they sidled up and plumped down next to Lucette, who turned to them with her last, last, last free gift of staunch courtesy that was stronger than failure and death.
Vladimir Nabokov
#83. Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past
Vladimir Nabokov
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. Nobody strolled and laughed on the sidewalks as relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow, rotting Europe.
Vladimir Nabokov
#88. 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
#89. 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
#91. 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
#96. This, to use an American term in which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was it.
Vladimir Nabokov
#97. No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it.
Vladimir Nabokov
#98. 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
#99. Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
Vladimir Nabokov
#100. 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
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