Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

"Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know."

"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."

"Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it."

"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."

"Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."

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

"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."

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

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

"For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."

"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words"

"It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot."

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

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

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

"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."

"The tiny madman in his padded cell."

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