Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.
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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!
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
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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.
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Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
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I think it is all a matter of love.
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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.
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All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
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In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
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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.
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I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
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Look at this tangle of thorns.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
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When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.