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A writer is lost when he grows interested in such questions as 'what is art?' and 'what is an artist's duty?


Vladimir Nabokov

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Ques eso? Queso?
NOLAN J. VANDER HAAGEN The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception...
SAM HARRIS When push comes to shove would people do what they felt was right, to get justice done or would they...
GARY F EVANS... When you add love to sex, it feels as if your soul is being drawn from the chains of gravity into th...
CHLOE THURLOW Love? I always thought love was just something that ate away your sanity, left you with an inferiori...
TOMOKO HAYAKAWA How do you love your children?
By doing what's best for them.
Then how would you love your...
J. GRANT HOWARD It is what it is, it is what you make it.
JAMES DURBIN The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible s...
WILFRID SELLARS FOOTBALL IS A DECISION GAME BASED ON QUICK THINKING IN RELATION TO WHAT IS HAPPENING AROUND YOU AND ...
LERCHE NJANG What if — is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad c...
DONNA TARTT I regret that I wasn't more successful with my marriages, but it is what it is.
TED TURNER How do you know if something is real? That’s easy. Does it change you? Does it form you? Does it g...
C. JOYBELL C. No other photographer had such immediate and intimate access to Nabokov over so many years, ... Vlad...
BRIAN BOYD What is sin?
It is the glory of God not honored.
The holiness of God not reverenced.
...
JOHN PIPER Love is insanity, apparently.
COREY ANN HAYDU Love, real love, the kind that you fall in, isn’t like Corinthians. The “suffereth long” and �...
JULIE ANNE LONG Love without reason is fleeting; love without emotion, dry.
J.R. MORALES Szerzetesek, vannak tanulatlan, közönséges emberek, akik nem gondolnak a nemes dolgokkal, nem hal...
GAUTAMA BUDDHA És Brahmá, a Teremtő, felső ruháját fél vállán átvetve, összetett kézzel meghajolt a Mag...
GAUTAMA BUDDHA See the world for what it is.
BEAUTIFUL!
ANTHONY T. HINCKS There’s a reason for the word heartbeat not be called beat of heart. The perfect woman only needs ...
ROBIN SACREDFIRE Unpredictability means what it means. I don't know how you define it. It is what it is.
MICHAEL KEATON There is a law of the natural worlds (the spiritual and the physical) and this is something I have u...
C. JOYBELL C. Real love is feeling so loved and so secure that even your name feels safe in his mouth.
CJ HECK What Fucks me... is that we both are the same... we all walk on the same path... but everything is a...
DEYTH BANGER Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C. It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delive...
DAN FLAVIN With '10,000,' our aim was to make a film that was entertaining and a roller-coaster ride; i...
STEVEN STRAIT God exists and he is an atom. So he exists in every thing and everywhere. An atom is a unit and exam...
DEBASISH MRIDHA Life is an audition.
THOMAS FLAJNIK - ANTICHIMERAPODAL Our life is a series of moments. Let them all go. Moments. All gathering towards this one.
NOW IS GOOD It is the simple things that are in the ocean. People think that simple things are on the seashore, ...
C. JOYBELL C. I never like it when a celebrity goes on Twitter and says, 'This isn't true!' It is what...
HARRY STYLES Sooner or later, what you do will speak
SOTONYE ANGA Love. What is it truly? Love is a spiritual state, an intangible, often insatiable need to put one's...
BELLA VESPIRA What is love?
It's not empathy, nor kindness.
Empathy takes two, the one who hurts and the...
NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS What is the essence of networking? I would say first collecting the dots and then connecting the dot...
SIMCHA GLUCK What is happiness? The feeling that power increases - that resistance is being overcome
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE She buys "mixed salad greens" for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get...
RUDOLPH DELSON ...I've learned that doing what you think is right doesn't always make you feel good. For another, I...
ANN RINALDI Wanting something badly even though it could hurt you," Bentley repeated. He looked up at the ceilin...
NELLIE CHRISTINE Women think they can act like evil monsters from hell and be loved like a princess. It's as if the d...
ROBIN SACREDFIRE You know, I don't think my music is important, I don't think it's changing the world, I ...
SUFJAN STEVENS A dead heart is a dead life; keep your heart alive; let your heart beat for something unique!
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH A mother isn’t the person who births you; it’s the person who rears you and shows you love.
RAQUEL CEPEDA Life is a matter of choosing what is good for you.
NAPZ CHERUB PELLAZO Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Love ? Love is when you are ready to do every possible and positive thing for someone,
SID I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn’t exist,
That there are hills, valleys,...
ALBERTO CAEIRO Do what is best for you; it will be the best for the world.
DEBASISH MRIDHA Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He ...
GORE VIDAL Commemoration of Albrecht Dürer, artist, 1528, and Michelangelo Buonarrotti, artist, spiritual ...
JOHN W. DIXON Aimer, ça ne veut pas dire se ressembler. Aimer, ça ne veut pas dire être pareils, se conduire co...
JUSTINE LéVY Romantic love, I think, requires a degree of physical attraction, but devotion is needed to maintain...
ANGELA N. BLOUNT Captain America is an interesting character because it makes you ask those questions in yourself as ...
MARK WAID You get to the point where you're like, 'I'm just doing me, and if people don't like...
BEBE REXHA I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.
ALBERTO CAEIRO It is what it is and so is my determination to change 'what is' into a better 'is'.
BRANDON A. TREAN Life is a re-discovery.
BRIAN BLESSED If you think that life is a celebration full of party poppers and merry go rounds it's not it's a ga...
GARY F EVANS... Life Is a Misconception.
DEYTH BANGER Life is a desire!
DEYTH BANGER To trust someone you must firstly remember that it is a two way street that will go all the way if y...
GARY F EVANS... It is a lie.
ARTHUR MILLER To stand on the
brink of what is coming, feeling eager, optimistic anticipation—with no feeli...
ASK AND IT IS GIVEN Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.
ALBERT EINSTEIN At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I take the good with the bad. I always wanted to be a comic, and part of that, for me, was that I wa...
ERIK GRIFFIN Steve Martin is such an exquisite and precise writer. Everything is so clear; it's like a bell. ...
JASON SCHWARTZMAN Let your actions speak LOVE. No matter what it is.
NAPZ CHERUB PELLAZO Love does not depend on circumstance - it is a decision, not a feeling.
J.R. MORALES Contrary to popular belief, love is not found. It is achieved.
J.R. MORALES Next generations will not know what is to have childhood.
DANIEL MELGAçO How you see the world is a reflection of what is within you.
STEPHEN RICHARDS Courage is feeling justly afraid and yet still doing what is right.
SHANNON HALE Be a good guide, tell me what you see, are sure is that?
Please try to describe the picture as ...
DEYTH BANGER To see what God is like, we must look at Jesus. He perfectly represents God to men in a form which t...
WILLIAM BARCLAY Today A woman is one who tries to bring a man down. A man is one who has to keep that woman in check...
APURVA GAGLANI It is so fascinating that when after a hard stressful day we calm our mind and release the stress fr...
GARY F EVANS... Seeing, touching is believing!
THOMAS FLAJNIK - ANTICHIMERAPODAL SEO is DEAD in the eyes of the people who know LESS about it.
J. ORACOY I let out a sound that was definitely not a whimper. It was something far more manly, no matter what...
BRANDON SANDERSON Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry, an...
LAURIE BUCHANAN, PHD The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.
ELIA KAZAN The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ For me, my life is a journey.
JAY ELECTRONICA Hip-hop is such a disposable art form from a business standpoint. It never treats its artists as art...
QUESTLOVE what is bad for the heart is good for art. The terrible irony of our lives as artists.
JANDY NELSON Stand for something. Make your life mean something. Start where you are with what you have. You are ...
GERMANY KENT Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
J.R. RIM All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
PABLO PICASSO When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily mani...
DAVE GROHL I saw a lot of men die there. Most men. Do you know what killed them?”…”Despair,” said Finne...
LOUISE PENNY Love isn't the work of the tender and the gentle;
Love is the work of wrestlers.
The one w...
JALALUDDIN MEVLANA RUMI Life is a risk.
CARMELO ANTHONY When he entered the anteroom, two women looked up at him. One was Miss Robertson, the governor's sec...
GEORGE P. ELLIOTT You yawn to equalize the pressure on your eardrums. This pressure change outside your eardrums unb...
WHY YAWNING IS CONTAGIOUS Be original, be yourself, be you.
ELISE R MAUDE IS As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually h...
KAZUO ISHIGURO

More Vladimir Nabokov

And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especiall...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly rec...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers,...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and ge...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.
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 I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, f...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The tiny madman in his padded cell.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event,...
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 Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Solitude is the playfield of Satan. - Pale Fire, 1962.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to en...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV 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 Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the read...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For m...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the h...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss som...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Caress the detail, the divine detail.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, t...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme met...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before bein...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of he...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the st...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV There was no Lo to behold.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Har...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. Sh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, tr...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily ap...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Words without experience are meaningless.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—En...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their l...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exa...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV And the rest is rust and stardust.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Dear Jesus, do something.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imag...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words
VLADIMIR NABOKOV My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the mos...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
My sin, my soul.
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the to...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Caress the detail, the divine detail
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 Genius is an African who dreams up snow
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Other men die; but I Am not another; therefore I'll not die
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the first - a dull man writing broken English, the second - ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic b...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Solitude is the play field of Satan
VLADIMIR NABOKOV [Against whom was it turned? Against whom did he conspire?] Tum-tee-tum. And once more - TUM! ... I ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV - A sentyment staje się uciążliwy. W końcu jest coś nazbyt fizycznego w próbie zachowania czą...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, ban...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, hap...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness....
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in k...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You have to be an artist and a madman...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. Sh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of partin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
VLADIMIR NABOKOV And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poiso...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Ink, a Drug.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything i...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the sa...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apolo...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a derang...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The color of one's creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in ti...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anythin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV but that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remain...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a si...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sen...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bl...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subd...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV My little cup brims with tiddles.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal v...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
VLADIMIR NABOKOV From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed betwe...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita, luz de mi vida, fuego de mis entrañas. Pecado mío, alma mía. Lo-li-ta: la punta de la len...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon wh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs throu...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable na...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling
VLADIMIR NABOKOV In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV