Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

• A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
• Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
• 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.
• No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
• My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
• Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
• Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
• It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up 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.
• It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
• 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.
• I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
• I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
• 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.
• A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
• I confess, I do not believe in time.
• Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
• 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.
• Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
• Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
• Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
• Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
• Caress the detail, the divine detail.
• All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
• A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
• I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
• The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
• Revelation can be more perilous than 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.
• 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.
• There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
• You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
• 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.
• 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.
• There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
• Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
• Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
• 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.
• The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
• Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
• The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.