Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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

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.

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.

as if it were a point of honor which, indeed, a point of art often is.

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.

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

Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.

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

There exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.

Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

[...] and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.

Leave your incidental Dick.

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.

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

There is nothing truer than a true illusion.

There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.

Time is but memory in the making.

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

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

The truth is not in the touch of a stone, but in what is carved into it.

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

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

Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

The sun shines for everybody. The sun shines for everybody, everybody in love.

My pencils outlast their erasers.

Life is a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

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

Happy is he who gets the last laugh.

A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.

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

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited.

Literature was born not 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.

Reality is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks.

Consciousness is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

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

Memory is like a garbage disposal: it churns the past.

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

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.

Art is a divine game.

The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

Laughter in the dark.

Words without experience are meaningless.

The cradle rocks above an abyss.

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

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.

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.

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.

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

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

Reality is a very subjective affair.

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Time without consciousness—lower animal world.

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

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

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