Quotes About Nabokov

Let me repeat with quite force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow moving tall, with dark soft hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour.

Dostoevski's The Double is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's Nose.

And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche: ...Beneath the sky Of my America to sigh For one locality in Russia. (a passage not for 'general readers' but for 'idiots')

Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.

Oh, Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?

Yes, I think that of all his books this is my favourite one. I don't know whether it makes one "think," and I don't much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like its manners.

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.

Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.

By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.

And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain.

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

If sex is the sermon made of art, love is the lady of that tower.

If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look.

I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.

Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents.

Dr. Falternfels was writing and smiling; his sandwich was half unwrapped; his dog was dead.

There is nothing so banal in the world,' said Ada 'than pitching stones at a hawfinch.

we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.

Religion is boring and alien to me and relates no more than a chimera to what is to me the reality of the spirit.

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

I shall vomit,' said Hugh, 'if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot.'

Space' (it says here, rather suggestively) 'denotes the property, you are my property, in virtue of which, you are my virtue, rigid bodies can occupy different positions.' Nice? Nice.

The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes.

Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that, in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.' Lolita, Part II, Chapter 31