Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

You have to be an artist and a madman...

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.

I often felt we lived in a lighted house of glass, and that any moment some thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded window to obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur would have paid a small fortune to watch.

even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

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

Here, I'll tell you—with my love I could have filled ten centuries of fire, songs, and valour—ten whole centuries, enormous and winged,—full of knights riding up blazing hills—and legends about giants—and fierce Troys—and orange sails—and pirates—and poets.

If there is anything of which I am certain in life it is that I shall never exchange the liberty of my exile for the vile parody of home.

It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color.

One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.

The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.

In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes […], sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose- and that not owning to some blessed pill or potion […] or at least without our knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug.

She was my darling: difficult, morose - But still my darling.

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

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.

It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle

She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply.

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. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

Good by-aye! she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.

I was always lonely and I am lonely still.

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 lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating.

One last word are you quite quite ure that - well not tomorrow of course and not after tomorrow but - well - some day any day you will not come to live with me I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries if you give me that microscopic hope.