Vladimir Nabokov quotes

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea. (Vladimir Nabokov)
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
Vladimir Nabokov
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Vladimir Nabokov
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Vladimir Nabokov
Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. (Vladimir Nabokov)
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov
All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
Vladimir Nabokov
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Vladimir Nabokov
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Vladimir Nabokov
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
Vladimir Nabokov
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man. (Vladimir Nabokov)
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
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
I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
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