Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

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.
Vladimir Nabokov
2
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
Vladimir Nabokov
3
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
5
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
7
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
9
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov
10
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
Vladimir Nabokov
11
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
Vladimir Nabokov
12
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov
13
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov
14
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov
15
I confess, I do not believe in time.
Vladimir Nabokov
16
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
18
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
Vladimir Nabokov
19
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
21
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Vladimir Nabokov
22
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
Vladimir Nabokov
23
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Vladimir Nabokov
24
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
Vladimir Nabokov
25
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
27
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
30
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
Vladimir Nabokov
31
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
Vladimir Nabokov
32
There is only one school of literature – that of talent.
Vladimir Nabokov
33
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Vladimir Nabokov