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Home
Authors
Vladimir Nabokov
American
Novelist
About the author
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.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Love
#Work
#Fiction
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Dreams
#Genius
#African
#Snow
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Existence
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Class
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Being
#State
#Mind
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Detail
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Style
#First
#Blush
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Imagination
#Writer
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Work
#Art
#Society
#Importance
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Love
#Memory
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Mind
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Revolution
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.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Painting
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Art
#Play
#Power
#Magic
There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#School
#Talent
#Literature
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Style
#Prose
#Fancy
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.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Nothing
#World
#Mediocrity
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.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Mind
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Airplanes
#Aphorisms
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Nothing
#Vulgarity
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#People
#Harm
#Hate
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Satire
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.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Darkness
#Light
#Existence
#Common sense
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Sea
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Style
#Ideas
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Evolution
#Nonsense
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#World
#Fiction
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Nothing
#Past
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.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Words
#Feeling
#Being
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Crime
#Stupidity
#Music
#Oppression
#Cruelty
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Man
#Literature
#Butterflies
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Life
#Death
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Dreams
#Pity
#Genius
#African
#Snow
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.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#War
#Nature
#states
#Detail
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Life
#Imagination
#Order
#Delight
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Time
#Reading
#Effort
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Genius
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Right
#Mind
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.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#World
#Past
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Home
#Past
#Present
I confess, I do not believe in time.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Time
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Vladimir Nabokov,
American
Novelist
#Words
#Poetry