Words matter. These are the best Vladimir Nabokov Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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.
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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 cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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.
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.
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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.
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
I confess, I do not believe in time.
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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.
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
