Top 366 Quotes & Sayings by Vladimir Nabokov

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

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

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

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

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

I confess, I do not believe in time.

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

Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.

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.

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

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.

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

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

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

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

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

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

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.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

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

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

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.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

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.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

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

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

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

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

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.

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

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.

Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.

Toska - noun /?t?-sk?/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.