Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

241 Sourced Quotes

I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts.

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
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.

Vladimir Nabokov
All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.

Vladimir Nabokov
I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

Vladimir Nabokov
The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison.

Vladimir Nabokov
The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

Vladimir Nabokov
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

Vladimir Nabokov
What!" cried Bretwit in candid surprise, "They know at home that His Majesty has left Zembla?

Vladimir Nabokov
There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of categories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.

Vladimir Nabokov
And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.

Vladimir Nabokov
Like so many aging college people, Pnin had long since ceased to notice the existence of students on campus.
Nabokov taught at Cornell

Vladimir Nabokov
I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

Vladimir Nabokov
There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.

Vladimir Nabokov
All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.

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

Vladimir Nabokov
After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct.

Vladimir Nabokov
Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.

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

Vladimir Nabokov
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world's muteness.

Vladimir Nabokov