Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.

I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.

The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong.

When, on a Sunday evening in May 1876, Anna throws herself under the freight train, she has existed more than four years since the beginning of the novel, but in the case of the Lyovins, during the same period, 1872 to 1876, hardly three years have elapsed. It is the best example of relativity in literature that is known to me.

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet Age: five thousand three hundred days.

He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.

Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy.

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

The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scam who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity, that idea, to make its azure origin plausible...

I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence—and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day. Readers are born free and ought to remain free.

I am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth.

I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.

Nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution.

Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there's a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I'll never find them again - never.

She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (' He broke my heart. You merely broke my life').

Your silence was effortless and windless, like the silence of clouds or plants. All silence is the recognition of a mystery. There was much about you that seemed mysterious. A

For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases.

What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion?

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

In spite of everything I love you, and will go on loving you–on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck–even then. And afterwards–perhaps most of all afterwards–I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I… we shall connect the points… and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a "young girl," and then, into a "college girl"—that horror of horrors.

To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill — 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.

photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall.

The few times I said to myself anywhere: 'Now that's a nice spot for a permanent home,' I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth.