Vladimir Nabokov Quotes | Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have...
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That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.
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Whether or not his newspaper and a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called "real life" of the so- called average m...
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Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
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Today one does not hear much about him.... The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will...
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Let us wait for the page proof.
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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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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
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My loathings are simple stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
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Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known... this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.
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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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Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
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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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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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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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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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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
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Among the many gifts I showered on Martin, I was careful not to include talent. How easy it would have been to make him an artist, a writer; h...
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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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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
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Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both Rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky
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To a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of consciousness—which again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to be...
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
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The wedding was a quiet affair, and when called upon to enjoy my promotion from lodger to lover did I experience only bitterness and distaste?...
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