Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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A good laugh is the best pesticide.
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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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The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road.
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too.
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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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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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Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.
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Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
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No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.
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When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - "hoping that I like the book as much as he does" - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.
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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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It is certainly not then-not in dreams- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
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It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
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It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.
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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.
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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
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Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being - not a constant state - that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden.
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Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the a.non.y.muse roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.