Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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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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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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...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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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.
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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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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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The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
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I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
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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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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
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A good laugh is the best pesticide.
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Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.
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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.