Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

I think it is all a matter of love.

To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.

I think it is all a matter of love the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

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.

I dreamt of you last night - as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.

No one can any longer write in the fat style of Strauss. That was killed by Stravinsky. He stripped the body of much of its clothes. Music is the craft of building structures with sound and that is what Stravinsky represents.

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?

Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.

I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.

Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.

And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.

I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Dear Jesus, do something.

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