Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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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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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 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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And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
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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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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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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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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
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I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.
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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 could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
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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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I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.
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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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The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
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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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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
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If he failed the first time he took his driver's licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled. He was more circumspect the next time, and passed.
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There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.
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The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.