Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Vladimir Nabokov Quotes. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
2
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
3
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
4
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.
5
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
6
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.
7
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
8
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.
9
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
10
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
11
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
12
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
13
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
14
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
15
I confess, I do not believe in time.
16
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
17
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.
18
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
19
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
20
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.
21
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
22
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
23
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
24
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
25
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
26
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
27
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
28
Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
29
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
30
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
31
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
32
There is only one school of literature – that of talent.
33
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
