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

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