Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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One is always at home in one's past.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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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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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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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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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.