Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian-American novelist and short story writer.
(1899c - 1977)
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
[Genius]
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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.
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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I confess, I do not believe in time.
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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.
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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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.
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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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.
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