Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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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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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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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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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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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.
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Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
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How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
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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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I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
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What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.
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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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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
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My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.
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The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
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I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
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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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I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
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Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.