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 | 2,814 visits |
Quotations
| • | Actually he was a pessimist, and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man. 8 |
| • | Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. 8 |
| • | 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. 7 |
| • | The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea. 6 |
| • | And then will come the day when the last person who remembers me will die. 5 |
| • | Years of secret suffering had taught me superhuman self-control. 5 |
| • | Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. 5 |
| • | Let all of life be an unfettered howl. 5 |
| • | When I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity, I know that either the critic or the author is a fool. 4 |
| • | Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional. 4 |
| • | All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born. 4 |
| • | Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. 4 |
| • | Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are. 4 |
| • | Philosophy is the invention of the rich. 3 |
| • | The isms go, the ist dies, art remains. 3 |
| • | The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense. 3 |
| • | Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical. 3 |
| • | 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. 3 |
| • | Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness. 3 |
| • | 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. 3 |
| • | You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own. 3 |
| • | Our imagination flies —we are its shadow on the earth. 3 |
| • | It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. 3 |
| • | My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting. 3 |
| • | We think not in words but in shadows of words. 3 |
| • | I appeal to parents: never, never say, “Hurry up,” to a child. 2 |
| • | One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx. 2 |
| • | What makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art. 2 |
| • | Dostoevski’s “The Double” is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's “Nose.” 2 |
| • | The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them. 2 |
| • | In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. 2 |
| • | All the information I have about myself is from forged documents. 2 |
| • | The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition. 2 |
| • | Caress the detail, the divine detail. 2 |
| • | Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. 2 |
| • | While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. 2 |
| • | A person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time. 2 |
| • | 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. 2 |
| • | All religions are based on obsolete terminology. 2 |
| • | There is no science without fancy and no art without fact. 2 |
| • | Genius is finding the invisible link between things. 2 |
| • | At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air. 2 |
| • | 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. 2 |
| • | I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes. 2 |
| • | Play! Invent the world! Invent reality! 2 |
| • | Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name. 2 |
| • | Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. 2 |
| • | Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta. 2 |
| • | I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child. (because of his Russian accent) 2 |
| • | I don't think in any language. I think in images. 2 |
| • | Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. 2 |
| • | I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else. 2 |
