Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Meaning of the quote
Satire is a way to teach people something in a funny or critical way, while parody is just a game where you imitate something in a silly or exaggerated manner. Satire has a message or meaning behind it, but parody is just for fun and entertainment.
About Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov was a renowned Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. He wrote his early novels in Russian while living in Berlin, then moved to the United States and began writing in English. Nabokov is known for his masterpieces like Lolita and Pale Fire, and his memoir Speak, Memory is considered one of the greatest works of nonfiction in the 20th century.
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More quotes from Vladimir Nabokov
It’s a pity one can’t imagine what one can’t compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
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.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
I confess, I do not believe in time.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
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.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
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.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
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.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
The more gifted and talkative one’s characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
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.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
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.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
There is only one school of literature – that of talent.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
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.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
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.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
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.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
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.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor (1899-1977)