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Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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Type: Novelist Quotes Category: American Novelist Quotes Date of Birth: April 22, 1899 Date of Death: July 2, 1977 Nationality: American Find on Amazon: Vladimir Nabokov Related Authors: Ernest Hemingway Richard Bach Gore Vidal Anne Rice William Faulkner Herman Melville Toni Morrison Will Thomas |
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov 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 A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual. Vladimir Nabokov A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist. Vladimir Nabokov 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 Caress the detail, the divine detail. Vladimir Nabokov Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. Vladimir Nabokov Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know. Vladimir Nabokov Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece. Vladimir Nabokov Genius is an African who dreams up snow. Vladimir Nabokov 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 I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. Vladimir Nabokov I confess, I do not believe in time. Vladimir Nabokov 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. Vladimir Nabokov I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. Vladimir Nabokov I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. Vladimir Nabokov I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading. Vladimir Nabokov 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 It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot. Vladimir Nabokov 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 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 Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. Vladimir Nabokov Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one. Vladimir Nabokov Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man. Vladimir Nabokov My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. Vladimir Nabokov No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has. Vladimir Nabokov Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. Vladimir Nabokov Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. Vladimir Nabokov Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. Vladimir Nabokov Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Vladimir Nabokov Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. Vladimir Nabokov Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Vladimir Nabokov Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. Vladimir Nabokov The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea. Vladimir Nabokov 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. Vladimir Nabokov The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense. Vladimir Nabokov 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 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 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 There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. Vladimir Nabokov 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 There is only one school of literature - that of talent. Vladimir Nabokov 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 Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed. Vladimir Nabokov You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Vladimir Nabokov |
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