A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

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 Quote

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

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 Quote

It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote

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 Quote

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
- Vladimir Nabokov Quote