Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes

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

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

Ink, a Drug.

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

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.

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

And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

We all have such fateful objects - it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another - carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

The square root of I is I.