Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

241 Sourced Quotes

To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and nature. Every writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature.

Vladimir Nabokov
I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.

Vladimir Nabokov
But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since." "this then is my story. i have reread it. it has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. at this or that twist of it i feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than i care to probe.

Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.

Vladimir Nabokov
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.

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

Vladimir Nabokov
My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.

Vladimir Nabokov
While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

Vladimir Nabokov
Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

Vladimir Nabokov
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.

Vladimir Nabokov
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.

Vladimir Nabokov
I am sentimental,' she said. 'I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.

Vladimir Nabokov
The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.

Vladimir Nabokov
What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?

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

Vladimir Nabokov
Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.

Vladimir Nabokov
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.

Vladimir Nabokov
A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

Vladimir Nabokov
I never imagined that I should be able to live by my writing, but now I am kept by a little girl named Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov
I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling

Vladimir Nabokov
The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.

Vladimir Nabokov
In high art and pure science detail is everything.

Vladimir Nabokov
There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

Vladimir Nabokov
Do what only a true artist can do... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation

Vladimir Nabokov
I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.

Vladimir Nabokov
When a man writes a letter to himself, it is a pity to post it to somebody else. Perhaps the same is true of a book.

Vladimir Nabokov
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

Vladimir Nabokov
Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.

Vladimir Nabokov
I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov
While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.

Vladimir Nabokov