Vladimir Nabokov Quotes and Sayings
- 1
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 5
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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Caress the detail, the divine detail. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 8
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 10
Genius is an African who dreams up snow. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 11
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 13
I confess, I do not believe in time. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 14
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 17
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 19
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 20
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. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 22
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 23
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 24
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 28
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 29
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 30
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 33
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 34
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 35
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 36
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 37
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 38
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 39
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 40
There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 41
There is only one school of literature - that of talent. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 42
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. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 43
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑
- 44
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Vladimir Nabokov | Refcard PDF ↑