Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.
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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts 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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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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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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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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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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a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s watch, since together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny.
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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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...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
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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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My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
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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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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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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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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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A good laugh is the best pesticide.
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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.