Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all la...

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only ins...

There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk...

This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss,...

To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can...

Tú me echabas una mirada con un gris signo de interrogación en tus ojos. Oh, no, no empecemos de nuevo (incredulidad, exasperación). Pues nunca te dignabas a creer que yo pudiera sentir el deseo -sin...

We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a gynecologist feeling a tumor.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

What are these hopes, and who is this savior? Imagination, replied Cincinnatus.

What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.

When I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool

When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes e...

When you laugh, I want to transform theentire world so it will mirror you.

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote poin...

While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whip...

You came into my life-not as one comes to visit (you know, not taking one’s hat off) but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your s...

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

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.

You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infini...