Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

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.

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.

It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.

All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.

By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.

A good laugh is the best pesticide.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

One is always at home in one's past.

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

as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

I think she always nursed a small mad hope.

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.

Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.