Vladimir Nabokov's Quotes

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

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.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.