Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

sham idealists, [are] people who can somehow combine what they call the good and the beautiful with material things, such as a bureaucratic career, etc.

Lo espiritual y lo físico se habían fundido en nosotros con perfección tal que no puede sino resultar incomprensible para los jovenzuelos materialistas, rudos y de mentes uniformes, típicos de nuestro tiempo.

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

I would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks or at a distant hill scrambling out — scarred but still untamed — from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to swallow it.

Glancing sideways, he said that he loved her. Then, turning rapidly, he walked away and entered a tobacco shop.

When you read Turgenev, you know you are reading Turgenev. When you read Tolstoy, you read just because you cannot stop.

A paper of mine entitled The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it.

Tolstoy's prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window while we sit reading his book.

Readers call Tolstoy a giant not because other writers are dwarfs but because he remains always of exactly our own stature,† exactly keeping pace with us instead of passing by in the distance, as other authors do.

All I manage to glimpse is an effect of melting light on one side of her misty hair, and in this, I suspect, I am insidiously influenced by the standard artistry of modern photography and I feel how much easier writing must have been in former days when one's imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tire company's pictorial advertisement.

Why is it so difficult--so degradingly difficult--to bring the notion of Time into mental focus and keep it there for inspection? What an effort, what fumbling, what irritating fatigue!

On z?ama? mi serce. A Ty mi z?ama?e? tylko ?ycie.

Caress the details, the divine details. In high art and pure science detail is everything.

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.

She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago

I'd much prefer to speak of the modern books that I hate at first sight: the earnest case histories of minority groups, the sorrows of homosexuals, the anti-American Sovietnam sermon, the picaresque yarn larded with juvenile obscenities.

The whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life.

Ganin now tried to recapture that scent again, mixed with the fresh smells of the autumnal park, but, as we know, memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

The artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more than his predecessor, penetrating further with a keener and more brilliant eye—and this is the artistic result.

I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

Como suele ocurrir con muchas personas que no se preocupan por la religión en su vida habitual, inventé rápidamente un Dios suave, tierno, lacrimoso, y susurré una plegaria personal. Permíteme llegar a tiempo, permítele resistir hasta que llegue, permítele decirme su secreto.

She showed a fierce insatiable curiosity for my past. She desired me to resuscitate all my loves so that she might make me insult them, and trample upon them, and revoke them apostately and totally, thus destroying my past.

Eis a pessoa que eu quero. Olá, pessoa! Não me ouve.

Literature is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images. Ideas do not matter much in comparison to a book's imagery and magic. The word, the expression, the image is the true function of literature. Not ideas.