Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

"Caress the detail, the divine detail."

"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist."

"There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion."

"A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past."

"The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea."

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

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

"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

"Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution."

"A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter."

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

"Genius is an African who dreams up snow."

"I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst."

"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."

"I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."