Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
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Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
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One is always at home in one's past.
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
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I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
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As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.
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My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.