Vladimir Nabokov Short Quotes

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In high art and pure science detail is everything.

Vladimir Nabokov
The work of art is invariably the creation of a new world.

Vladimir Nabokov
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Vladimir Nabokov
(hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)...

Vladimir Nabokov
There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

Vladimir Nabokov
A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.

Vladimir Nabokov
For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

Vladimir Nabokov
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Vladimir Nabokov
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

Vladimir Nabokov
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

Vladimir Nabokov
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?

Vladimir Nabokov
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.

Vladimir Nabokov
And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.

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

Vladimir Nabokov
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

Vladimir Nabokov
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Vladimir Nabokov
I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.

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

Vladimir Nabokov
Beauty plus pity—this is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

Vladimir Nabokov
I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust

Vladimir Nabokov
Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.

Vladimir Nabokov
I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with.

Vladimir Nabokov
Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?

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

Vladimir Nabokov
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
by the false azure in the windowpane;

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

Vladimir Nabokov
Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.

Vladimir Nabokov
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

Vladimir Nabokov
You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.

Vladimir Nabokov
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.

Vladimir Nabokov