Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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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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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
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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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My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?
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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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My little cup brims with tiddles.
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
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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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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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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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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 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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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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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.
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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
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A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
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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 contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.