Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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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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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 don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
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One is always at home in one's past.
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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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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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Genius is finding the invisible link between things.
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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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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts 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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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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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
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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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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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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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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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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
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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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It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
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All great novels are great fairy tales.