Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

You lie — she's not." "I beg your pardon?" "I said: July was hot.

While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body's every plea. One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangulated me.

Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

No, no puedes echarle mano de una pistola y pegarle un tiro a una chica a la que ni siquiera conoces, simplemente porque te atrae.

The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales... literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.

Para mí, una obra e ficción sólo existe en la medida en que me proporciona lo que llamaré lisa y llanamente placer estético, es decir, la sensación de que es algo, en algún lugar, relacionado con otros estados de ser en que el arte (curiosidad, ternura, bondad, éxtasis) es la norma.

We shall do our best to avoid the factual error of looking for so-called real life in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fictions of facts with the facts of fiction. ... A master piece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

We shall do our best to avoid the factual error of looking for so-called real life in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. ... A master piece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

I not only debar too definite a planet from any role in my story – from the role every dot and full stop should play in my story (which I see as a kind of celestial chart).

Every great writer is a great deceiver

Her painted eyelids were closed. A tear of no particular meaning gemmed the hard top of her cheek. Nobody could tell what went on in that little head. Waves of desire rippled there. — Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)

Oh, 'philosophy.' You know. When you try to imagine a mirok [small pink potato] without the least reference to any you have eaten or will eat.

Couleur locale has been responsible for many hasty appreciations, and local color is not a fast color.

Thus with cautious steps, among deceived enemies, I circulated, plated with poetry, armored with rhymes, stout with another man's song, stiff with cardboard, bullet-proof at long last.

It's crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating Jazzband. No?

I love you. Infinitely and inexpressibly. I've woken up in the middle of the night and here I am writing this. My love, my happiness.

She wore poetry.

It] may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised.

The Russian reader in old cultured Russia was certainly proud of Pushkin and of Gogol, but he was just as proud of Shakespeare or Dante, of Baudelaire or of Edgar Allan Poe, of Flaubert or of Homer, and this was the Russian reader's strength. I have a certain personal interest in the question, for if my fathers had not been good readers, I would hardly be here today, speaking of these matters in this tongue.

Outwardly, Roy was an obvious figure. If you drew a pair of old brown loafers, two beige elbow patches, a black pipe, and two baggy eyes under heavy eyebrows, the rest was easy to fill out.

When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the act of attention might lead to our sinking involuntarily into the history of that object.

Humbert, when you get to know me better, you'll find I'm extremely broad-minded.

What I am thinking of is the man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite because his curiosity surpasses his courage. Nothing will keep him back.

Martin was one of those people for whom a good book before sleep is something to look forward to all day. Such a person, upon happening to recall, amidst routine occupations, that on his bedside table a book is waiting for him, in perfect safety, feels a surge of inexpressible happiness.