Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."

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

"Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash."

"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."

"I confess, I do not believe in time."

"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."

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."

"There is only one school of literature - that of talent."

"Caress the detail, the divine detail."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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 would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."

"No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has."

"Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity."