Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

– Szeret mindent, amit a szép lányok szeretnek – mondta Van –, a bálokat, az orchideákat és a Cseresznyéskert-et.

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

Light in comparison with darkness is a void.

No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze...

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

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

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

'I shall vomit,' said Hugh, 'if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot.'

A sentyment staje się uciążliwy. W końcu jest coś nazbyt fizycznego w próbie zachowania cząstki dzieciństwa na swoim mostku. - Nie pan pierwszy sprowadza wiarę do zmysłu dotyku.

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 celesti...

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other...

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are t...

At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

Both were diverted by life's young fumblings,both saddened by the wisdom of time

Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire.

I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder...

I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This...

I suppose the pain of parting will be red and loud.

I think bourgeois fathers – wing-collar workers in pencil-striped pants, dignified, office-tied fathers, so different from young American veterans of today or from a happy, jobless Russian-born expatr...