110+ Vladimir Nabokov Quotes On Writing, Fantasy And Satire

Vladimir Nabokov was an American novelist, poet, and translator of Russian literature. He is best known for his novel Lolita, which was controversial due to its subject matter. He wrote in both English and Russian and was also a lepidopterist, an amateur entomologist who studies butterflies. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Vladimir Nabokov on writing, love, life.

Top 10 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

1. Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
2. Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.
3. And the rest is rust and stardust.
4. Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
6. Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
7. The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
8. There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
9. I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
10. Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

Vladimir Nabokov Image Quotes

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane. — Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov Short Quotes

• I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
• Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
• I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.
• For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
• Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
• It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
• We think not in words but in shadows of words.
• We are most artistically caged.
• Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
• if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.

Vladimir Nabokov Quotes About Writing

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers. — Vladimir Nabokov

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. — 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

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him. — Vladimir Nabokov

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English. — Vladimir Nabokov

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum. — Vladimir Nabokov

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. — Vladimir Nabokov

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for. — Vladimir Nabokov

Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both Rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky — Vladimir Nabokov

It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really. — Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov Quotes About Love

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! — Vladimir Nabokov

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. — Vladimir Nabokov

There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity. — Vladimir Nabokov

I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand. — Vladimir Nabokov

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. — Vladimir Nabokov

A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely. — Vladimir Nabokov

I think it is all a matter of love. — Vladimir Nabokov

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended. — Vladimir Nabokov

To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue. — Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov Quotes About Life

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. — 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. — Vladimir Nabokov

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses. — 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. — 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

Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity. — Vladimir Nabokov

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. — Vladimir Nabokov

Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after. — Vladimir Nabokov

I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life. — Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. — Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov Quotes About Imagination

Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple. — Vladimir Nabokov

I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth. — 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

Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. — Vladimir Nabokov

Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth. — 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

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't. — Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov Quotes About Heart

Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words. — Vladimir Nabokov

In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood. — Vladimir Nabokov

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French. — Vladimir Nabokov

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life. — Vladimir Nabokov

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle... — Vladimir Nabokov

My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys. — Vladimir Nabokov

My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ. — Vladimir Nabokov

We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break. — Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov Famous Quotes And Sayings

A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence. — Vladimir Nabokov

A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. — 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

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us. — Vladimir Nabokov

Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically. — Vladimir Nabokov

in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. — Vladimir Nabokov

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. — Vladimir Nabokov

Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat. — Vladimir Nabokov

There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness. — Vladimir Nabokov

There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone. — Vladimir Nabokov

All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born. — Vladimir Nabokov

There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius. — Vladimir Nabokov

Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval. — 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

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle. — Vladimir Nabokov

Genius is an African who dreams up snow. — Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. — Vladimir Nabokov

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. — Vladimir Nabokov

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. — Vladimir Nabokov

I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. — Vladimir Nabokov

...and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights. — Vladimir Nabokov

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. — Vladimir Nabokov

A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die. — Vladimir Nabokov

Solitude is the playfield of Satan. — Vladimir Nabokov

Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net. — Vladimir Nabokov

Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile. — Vladimir Nabokov

By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast. — Vladimir Nabokov

It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory. — Vladimir Nabokov

There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog. — Vladimir Nabokov

A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. — Vladimir Nabokov

But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another. — Vladimir Nabokov

Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. — Vladimir Nabokov

My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free? — Vladimir Nabokov

I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly. — 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 future is but the obsolete in reverse. — Vladimir Nabokov

As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage. — Vladimir Nabokov

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. — Vladimir Nabokov

Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world! — Vladimir Nabokov

Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture. — Vladimir Nabokov

The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned. — Vladimir Nabokov

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring. — Vladimir Nabokov

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. — Vladimir Nabokov

I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust — Vladimir Nabokov

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all. — Vladimir Nabokov

Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. — Vladimir Nabokov

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. — 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

I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations. — Vladimir Nabokov

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James. — Vladimir Nabokov

If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subdued, frightened-to-death rocking chair, before I drove to wherever the beast's lair was - and then pulled the pistol's foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger. — Vladimir Nabokov

Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . . — Vladimir Nabokov

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist. — Vladimir Nabokov

Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round. — Vladimir Nabokov

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth. — Vladimir Nabokov

The tiny madman in his padded cell. — Vladimir Nabokov

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them. — Vladimir Nabokov

I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. — Vladimir Nabokov

The lost glove is happy. — Vladimir Nabokov

Life Lessons by Vladimir Nabokov

1. Vladimir Nabokov's works emphasize the importance of pursuing one's passions and dreams, no matter how difficult it may seem. He also encourages readers to appreciate the beauty of life and to always strive to make the best of every situation. Finally, he reminds us that life is unpredictable and that we should always be prepared to face the unexpected.