Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Dostoevski's The Double is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's Nose.

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

I loathe popular pulp, I loathe go-go gangs, I loathe jungle music, I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories. I especially loathe vulgar movies—cripples raping nuns under tables, or naked-girl breasts squeezing against the tanned torsos of repulsive young males. And, really, I don't think I mock popular trash more often than do other authors who believe with me that a good laugh is the best pesticide.

There is only one school: that of talent.

My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs. Whenever I'd permit, Or, with a silent shiver, order it, Whatever in my field of vision dwelt – An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte Stilettos of a frozen stillicide – Was printed on my eyelids' nether side Where it would tarry for an hour or two, And while this lasted all I had to do Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves

This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe.

Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer's black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass!

Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.

Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This

If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.

In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper.

The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.

Why do you think I have ceased caring for you, Lo? -Well, you haven´t kissed me yet, have you?

I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting

Knight seemed to him to be constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules.

Nos queríamos con amor prematuro, con la violencia que a menudo destruye vidas adultas

To the sound of this voice, to the music of the chessboard's evil lure, Luzhin recalled, with the exquisite, moist melancholy peculiar to recollections of love, a thousand games that he had played in the past... There were combinations, pure and harmonious, where thought ascended marble stairs to victory; there were tender stirrings in one corner of the board, and a passionate explosion, and the fanfare of the Queen going to its sacrificial doom.

how can I write about this when I am afraid of not having time to finish and of stirring up all these thoughts in vain?

Time is but memory in the making.

My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart ("a hollow, muscular organ," according to the gruesome definition in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin's orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas.

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

The bowl that emerged was one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the recipient's mind a colored image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this pure inner blaze, but suddenly and forever leap into brilliant being when praised by an outsider to whom the true glory of the object is unknown.

Geniusz to brak przystosowania.