Vladimir Nabokov Quotes - Page 3

Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.

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.

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

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

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

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?

To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms - some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh.

И вот, то, что я давно подозревал, - бессмысленность мира, - стало мне очевидно. Я почувство

(T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.