"This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends ’ and ‘schools...
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
~ Vladimir Nabokov ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
More Vladimir Nabokov quotes
"Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.
"A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...
"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, ...
"I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of h...
"Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—unti...
"And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference b
"The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writ...
"Vladimir Nabokov“... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I...
"In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read...
"Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach ...
"There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic ...
"... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.
"I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No ma...
"We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally a...