Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
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The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
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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.
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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.
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The square root of I is I.
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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.
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The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.
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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.
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My characters are galley slaves.
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Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
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A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.... My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French. At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts.... In these circumstances nobody should ask me to submit to an interview if by "interview" a chat between two normal human beings is implied.
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My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward first the scepter of my passion.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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I don't think in any language. I think in images.