Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.

A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.

Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.

Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.

Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

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

a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.

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 confess, I do not believe in time.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

I am sentimental,' she said. 'I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.