Vladimir Nabokov quotes - page 8

I confess, I do not believe in time. (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. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. View quote
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. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. View quote
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. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. View quote
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. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
I don't think in any language. I think in images. (Vladimir Nabokov)
... in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon. View quote
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. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
... for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Most of the dandelions had changed from suns into moons. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
To begin with, let us take the following motto... Literature is Love. Now we can continue. View quote
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)
The character I have in view when I say "smug vulgarian" is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the total type, the genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity. He is the conformist, the man who conforms to his group, and he also is typified by something else: he is a pseudo-idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is pseudo-wise. The fraud is the closest ally of the true philistine. All such great words as "Beauty," "Love," "Nature," "Truth," and so on become masks and dupes when the smug vulgarian employs them. ... The philistine likes to impress and he likes to be impressed, in consequence of which a world of deception, of mutual cheating, is formed by him and around him. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
What moment in that gradual decay Does resurrection choose? What year? Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape? Are some less lucky, or do all escape? A syllogism; other men die But I am not another: therefore I'll not die. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Oh, "impressed" is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov - Image
Occupation: Russian-American Novelist
Born: April 10, 1899
Died: July 2, 1977
Quotes count: 254
Wikipedia: Vladimir Nabokov

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