Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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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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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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The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
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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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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
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All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.
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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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I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.
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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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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets.
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
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A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
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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.