Quotes by
Vladimir Nabokov |
1899-1977 , Russian-American writer
He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English. His Lolita (1955) is cited as one of the most important novels of the 20th century.Nabokov was also an expert lepidopterist and composer of chess problems.
| 52 quotes | 3,535 visits |
Quotations
| • | 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. 10 |
| • | Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. 9 |
| • | Actually he was a pessimist, and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man. 9 |
| • | The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea. 8 |
| • | Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are. 6 |
| • | Let all of life be an unfettered howl. 6 |
| • | Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. 6 |
| • | Years of secret suffering had taught me superhuman self-control. 6 |
| • | And then will come the day when the last person who remembers me will die. 6 |
| • | Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. 5 |
| • | There is no science without fancy and no art without fact. 5 |
| • | All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born. 5 |
| • | Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional. 5 |
| • | When I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity, I know that either the critic or the author is a fool. 5 |
| • | We think not in words but in shadows of words. 4 |
| • | My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting. 4 |
| • | It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. 4 |
| • | Our imagination flies —we are its shadow on the earth. 4 |
| • | You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own. 4 |
| • | 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. 4 |
| • | Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness. 4 |
| • | I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more. 4 |
| • | All religions are based on obsolete terminology. 4 |
| • | Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical. 4 |
| • | The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense. 4 |
| • | The isms go, the ist dies, art remains. 4 |
| • | Philosophy is the invention of the rich. 4 |
| • | I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else. 3 |
| • | Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. 3 |
| • | I don't think in any language. I think in images. 3 |
| • | I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child. (because of his Russian accent) 3 |
| • | Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta. 3 |
| • | Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. 3 |
| • | Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name. 3 |
| • | Play! Invent the world! Invent reality! 3 |
| • | I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes. 3 |
| • | Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him. 3 |
| • | At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air. 3 |
| • | Genius is finding the invisible link between things. 3 |
| • | I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don’t seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings. 3 |
| • | A person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time. 3 |
| • | While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. 3 |
| • | Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. 3 |
| • | Caress the detail, the divine detail. 3 |
| • | The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition. 3 |
| • | All the information I have about myself is from forged documents. 3 |
| • | In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. 3 |
| • | The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them. 3 |
| • | Dostoevski’s “The Double” is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's “Nose.” 3 |
| • | What makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art. 3 |
| • | One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx. 3 |
| • | I appeal to parents: never, never say, “Hurry up,” to a child. 3 |
