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.
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
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.
I confess, I do not believe in time.
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
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.
The tiny madman in his padded cell.
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.
Nabokov didn't think much of the works of many of his contemporaries such as William Faulkner, Berthold Brecht, Albert Camus, and Ezra Pound.
Nabokov refused to use a telephone.
Works were known for their complex plots, clever word play, and use of alliteration.
Wrote everything in longhand because he didn't know how to type.
Nabokov was educated at the Tenishev school in St. Petersburg.
Christopher Plummer played Nabokov in the short TV film Nabokov on Kafka. This was a filmed version of a lecture he once gave on author Franz Kafka.
Nabokov became a lecturer in comparative literature at Wellesley College in 1941.
When Nabokov first began writing he wrote in Russian but as the years passed he began writing in English.
Nabokov lived in the Montreaux Palace Hotel in Montreaux, Switzerland from 1960 until his death.
Nabokov's family left Russia after the collapse of the White Army and the final triumph of the Communists in the Russian Civil War.
During his years teaching at Wellesley College, Nabokov served as a one man Russian department teaching Russian language and literature.
In 1937, He moved, with his family, to Paris after the Nazi government released his father's assassin from prison.
In 1925, he married V?ra Slonim in Berlin.
In 1923, he graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge.
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