Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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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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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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...and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights.
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It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.
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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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Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
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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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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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My answer to your question'Does the writer have a social responsibility?' is NO.You owe me ten cents, sir.
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After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.
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And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.
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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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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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Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.
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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
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Look at this tangle of thorns.
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You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs―the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate―the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.