Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
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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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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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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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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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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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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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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 was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
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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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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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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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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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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
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Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.
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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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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.
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
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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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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts.
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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.