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Vladimir Nabokov Quotes | Quotes said by Vladimir Nabokov

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #1

    (T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #2

    - A sentyment staje sie uciazliwy. W koncu jest cos nazbyt fizycznego w próbie zachowania czastki dziecinstwa na swoim mostku.
    - Nie pan pierwszy sprowadza wiare do zmyslu dotyku.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #3

    ... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #4

    ...I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book....

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #5

    Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #6

    [...] nalezala jednak do tych kobiet, które lacza w sobie zdrowa urode z histeryczna lzawliwoscia, wybuchy liryczne z bardzo praktycznym, banalnym mysleniem, podly charakter z sentymentalizmem, ospala biernosc z trzezwa umiejetnoscia wysylania bliznich na poszukiwanie wiatru w polu.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #7

    [...] wszystko, co budzi zachwyt wywolany wiecznym zblizaniem sie do celu, czeka zaglada.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #8

    [S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #9

    A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #10

    A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing “classical” music; that two, he was doing it “softly”; and that three, “there were not many readers around in summer.” I was there, a one-man multitude.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #11

    A late arrival had the impression of lots of loud people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue space between two mirrors gorged with reflections. Because, I suppose, Cynthia wished to be the youngest in the room, the women she used to invite, married or single, were, at the best, in their precarious forties; some of them would bring from their homes, in dark taxis, intact vestiges of good looks, which, however, they lost as the party progressed. It has always amazed me - the capacity sociable weekend revelers have of finding almost at once, by a purely empiric but very precise method, a common denominator of drunkenness, to which everybody loyally sticks before descending, all together, to the next level. The rich friendliness of the matrons was marked by tomboyish overtones, while the fixed inward look of amiably tight men was like a sacrilegious parody of pregnancy. Although some of the guests were connected in one way or another with the arts, there was no inspired talk, no wreathed, elbow-propped heads, and of course no flute girls. From some vantage point where she had been sitting in a stranded mermaid pose on the pale carpet with one or two younger fellows, Cynthia, her face varnished with a film of beaming sweat, would creep up on her knees, a proffered plate of nuts in one hand, and crisply tap with the other the athletic leg of Cochran or Corcoran, an art dealer, ensconced, on a pearl-grey sofa, between two flushed, happily disintegrating ladies.

    At a further stage there would come spurts of more riotous gaiety. Corcoran or Coransky would grab Cynthia or some other wandering woman by the shoulder and lead her into a corner to confront her with a grinning imbroglio of private jokes and rumors, whereupon, with a laugh and a toss of her head, he would break away. And still later there would be flurries of intersexual chumminess, jocular reconciliations, a bare fleshy arm flung around another woman's husband (he standing very upright in the midst of a swaying room), or a sudden rush of flirtatious anger, of clumsy pursuit-and the quiet half smile of Bob Wheeler picking up glasses that grew like mushrooms in the shade of chairs. (The Vane Sisters)

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #12

    a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s watch, since together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #13

    A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #14

    A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things—how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver—and this inability enhanced my oppression.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #15

    A thousand years ago five minutes were
    Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
    Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
    Infinite aftertime: above your head
    They close like giant wings, and you are dead.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #16

    A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #17

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

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #18

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

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #19

    All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block; and if in the course of years I have got so used to my nightly ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar axe is coming out of its great velvet-lined case, initially I had no such comfort or defense: I had nothing - save a door left slightly ajar into Mademoiselle's room. Its vertical line of meek light was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim, just as the soul dissolves in the blackness of sleep.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #20

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

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #21

    All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #22

    All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #23

    and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pch radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I cancelled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and halfthrottled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque, part o nous ne serons jamais spars; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torneven then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #24

    And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #25

    And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the recognized arts. She had never been in close contact with such people — there was no one to compare him with except those inspired eccentrics, musicians and poets whose image one knows as clearly and as vaguely as that of a Roman Emperor, an inquisitor or a comedy miser. Her memory contained a modest dimly lit gallery with a sequence of all the people who had in any way caught her fancy.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #26

    And speaking of this wonderful machine:
    [840] I’m puzzled by the difference between
    Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,
    A testing of performing words, while he
    Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
    The other kind, much more decorous, when
    He’s in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,
    The abstract battle is concretely fought.
    The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar
    [850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,
    And thus it physically guides the phrase
    Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
    But method A is agony! The brain
    Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
    A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will
    Can interrupt, while the automaton
    Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #27

    And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #28

    And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #29

    And yet I shall try again: they are murdering me!--all right, all together once more: they are murdering me! and again: murdering... I want to write this in such a way that you will cover your ears, your membranaceous, simian ears that you hide under strands of beautiful feminine hair--but I know them, I see them, I pinch them, the cold little things, I worry them with my fingers to somehow warm them, bring them to life, render them human, force them to hear me.

  • Vladimir Nabokov Quote #30

    As Ganin looked up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky he realized with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended forever. It had lasted no more than four days—four days which were perhaps the happiest days of his life. But now he had exhausted his memories, was sated by them, and the image of Mary, together with that of the old dying poet, now remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory

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