Vladimir Nabokov quotes - page 7

Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. (Vladimir Nabokov)
Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Life is a message scribbled in the dark. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
I think he's crude, I think he's medieval, and I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don't have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don't see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
No free man needs a God; but was I free? View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
You have hal...... real bad, chum. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
True art is above false honor. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense-which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance ("Good Readers and Good Writers", p. 3). View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists. (Vladimir Nabokov)
In due time history will have denounced everybody. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
For we die every day; oblivion thrives. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
What!" cried Bretwit in candid surprise, "They know at home that His Majesty has left Zembla? View quote
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. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
There is only one school of literature - that of talent. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. (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. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. View quote
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. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov