Quotes About Literature

The subject of teaching Shakespeare at college level having been introduced: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull." Kinbote: "You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" Shade: "Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

An author's fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator; is this ever attained?

Zembla is a site devoted to the life and works of author, translator, and lepidopterist.

Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov's round of weird visits in Gogol's "Dead Souls.

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 will never go back. For the simple reason that all the Russia I need, after all, is with me--always with me. Her literature, her language, my own Russian childhood. I will never return, I will never surrender.

Everything he said should be followed by a big sic

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?

We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens. In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort in order to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port.

The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort.

There are certain trifles I do not forgive. Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot." - John Shade

The organs concerned in the production of English speech sounds are the larynx, the velum, the lips, the tongue (that punchinello in the troupe), and, last but not least, the lower jaw; mainly upon its overenergetic and somewhat ruminant motion did Pnin rely when translating in class passages in the Russian grammar or some poem by Pushkin. If his Russian was music, his English was murder.

A superficial reader of Proust's work- rather a contradiction in terms since a superficial reader will get so bored, so engulfed in his own yawns, that he will never finish the book- [the] inexperienced reader, let us say... will probably conclude that the main action of the book is a series of parties; for example, a dinner occupies a hundred and fifty pages, a soirée half a volume.

Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m'imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. "Monsieur Poe-poe," as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classes in Paris called the poet-poet.

Let us not look for the soul of Russia in the Russian novel: let us look for the individual genius. Look at the masterpiece, and not at the frame—and not at the faces of other people looking at the frame.

It had glistening eyes like sad black olives.

for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.

Vladimir Nabokov

Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and

To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist.

Tenho de reproduzir o impacto aquela visão instantânea por meio de uma sequência de palavras, mas seu acúmulo físico na página faz com que se perca a nitidez da percepção global. p. 112