Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

As it happens with many people who do not trouble about religion in the ordinary trend of life, I hastily invented a soft, warm, tear-misty God, and whispered an informal prayer. Let me get there in t...

Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradi...

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light....

I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.

I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. [...] Whatever evolution this or that popular character...

I qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic--because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old ch...

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked...

I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust

I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure--even when the velvety victim is locked up in one's dungeon--that som...

I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, ch...

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. Line

If his Russian was music, his English was murder.

If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.

It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

Mik az álmok? Jelenetek, triviális vagy tragikus, mozgó vagy statikus, fantasztikus vagy közönséges jelenetek véletlenszerű sorozatai, melyekben többé vagy kevésbé valószerű eseményeket habarcsolnak ö...

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert p...

Next day, after lunch, I went to see our doctor, a friendly fellow whose perfect bedside manner and complete reliance on a few patented drugs adequately masked his ignorance of, and indifference to, m...

One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a little quiz—-ten definitions of a reader, and from these ten the students...