Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
I confess, I do not believe in time.
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
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.
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
