Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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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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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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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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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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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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One is always at home in one's past.
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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
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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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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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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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There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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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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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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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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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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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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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.