Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
-
I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
-
Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
-
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
-
Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
-
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
-
Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
-
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
-
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.
-
The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
-
Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
-
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.
-
The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.
-
Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
-
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.
-
An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
-
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
-
Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.
-
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.
-
I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.