Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.

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.

Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.

The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.

And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.

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.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

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.

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.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.

What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.