Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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.

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

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.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

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.

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

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.

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.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

Solitude is the play field of Satan.

Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .

Other men die; but I Am not another; therefore I'll not die.