Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save f...

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking ...

The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hai...

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, inn...

... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red appl...

I notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantr...

Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight

One last word,' I said in my horrible careful English, 'are you quite, quite sure that—well, not tom...

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another...

Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father’s neck and ear while, with a casual arm, the man enveloped his...

You have to be an artist and a madman...

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have t...

and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more tha...

Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality, the deception was bearable. Un...

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anythin...

I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.

You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.

The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitiv...

For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child o...

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the hear...

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an ...

Dear Jesus, do something.

He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this...

In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces....

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal v...

That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is no...

Vladimir Nabokov“... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, ...

I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing...

[S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.

A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exa...

Who grins in official circumstances?

From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, care...

Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneat...

From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experi...

But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets i...

Lighted advertisements went running up dark red facades and dissipating again. He would pass girls; ...

I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by mock marria...

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with th...

If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man's logic and no man's ecstatic...

She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer...

There is yet another reason why I cannot, nor wish to, believe in God: the fairy tale about him is n...

You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things...

The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scam who had genius; it somehow reek...

God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as ...

Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.

Ink, a Drug.

To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something i...

We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing f...

The square root of I is I.

Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floatin...

And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysteri...

And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference b

Coordinating thereEvents and objects with remote eventsAnd vanished objects. Making ornamentsOf acci...

The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the mids...

This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my ap...

Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years ...

A late arrival had the impression of lots of loud people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue s...

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, ...

His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.

He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her ...

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping...

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mir...

Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm ...

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

Listen—I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered...

In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth ... and wondering with ...

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up...

Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.

My darling, what a cat they have! Something perfectly stupendous. Siamese, in colour dark beige, or ...

I confess, I do not believe in time.

Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with...

He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, t...

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school bo...

Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning ar...

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the h...

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...

No free man needs a God; but was I free?How fully I felt nature glued to meAnd how my childish palat...

It is interesting to ponder the fact that there is no real difference between what the Western Fasci...

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, ban...

...I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get ri...

I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of ...

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

as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style...

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bl...

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