Quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Had I not been a heterosexual male, I would have been a Lesbian.

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.

…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.

It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.

Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals.

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

In this lucid and flexible pattern only one thing remained always stationary, but this fallacy went unnoticed by Martha. The blind spot was the victim. The victim showed no signs of life before being deprived of it. If anything, the corpse which had to be moved and handled before burial seemed more active than its biological predecessor.