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Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the first - a dull man writing broken English, the second - a broken man writing dull English.


Vladimir Nabokov

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I survived that trouble so likewise may I survive this one.
OLD ENGLISH WRITING It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
H. L. MENCKEN I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.
HILAIRE BELLOC Peter was dull; he was at first Dull;--Oh, so dull--so very dull! Whether he talked, wrote, or...
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.
JOSEPH CONRAD No other photographer had such immediate and intimate access to Nabokov over so many years, ... Vlad...
BRIAN BOYD This is his second broken nose of the year. He's got two broken noses and a broken leg going right n...
BEN HOWLAND Because that he remembered not to shew mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might e...
BIBLE [When a man speaking broken English pushed through the crowd yesterday, excitedly asking,] Are you t...
ANTHONY WEINER Goethe once said of someone, He is a dull man. If he were a book, I would not read him.
JAMES BRYCE Goethe once said of someone, He is a dull man. If he were a book, I would not read him.
JAMES BRYCE We feel they need to learn English from a person and not a computer. It will be intensive, all based...
KAREN CARLSON The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
DEAN ACHESON Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. ...
JAMES JOYCE She is responsible for contacting donors, writing reports to them, fund-raising, proposal-writing an...
GHADA SNUNU I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historic...
CANDACE CAMP Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with mo...
LYNN ABBEY An English man does not travel to see English men.
LAURENCE STERNE Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional ...
DONALD E. WESTLAKE Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that...
SAMUEL JOHNSON My first roommate was from Hong Kong and spoke perfect English. He also spoke Mandarin and Cantonese...
CHERYL BAKER Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
CHARLES LAMB Life is as tedious as twice-told tale, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE I am a little pencil in God's hands. He does the thinking. He does the writing. He does everything a...
MOTHER TERESA I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.
ABIGAIL BRESLIN A famous man is Robin Hood The English ballad-singer's joy.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when ...
SAMUEL JOHNSON Major telecommunications equipment companies on three continents are standing up and saying that Qua...
DAVID A. DULL Major telecommunications equipment companies on three continents are standing up and saying that Qua...
DAVID A. DULL A dull man sits around and watches as the world is burning. An average man attempts to save his prop...
RICHARD BELLZON Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Spoken English Training is good if you want to produce puppets. Training in Writing in English is go...
APURVA GAGLANI No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable r...
HELEN KELLER People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English m...
HARRISON BIRTWISTLE ...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing th...
JOHN GEDDES Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.
ERIN MCKEAN It is like a documentary because she has it written day-by-day and incident-by-incident. She was a p...
JOAN ROSCOE Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Kathy Dewar, my high-school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I wrote my...
JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS Most of life is routine - dull and grubby, but routine is the momentum that keeps a man going.
BEN NICHOLAS God Child is a free and inspirational translation of Adam. Adam means 'human', not 'man'. The Hebrew...
STEFAN EMUNDS Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
EUGENE O'NEILL Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue
ANNE LAMOTT Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
EUGENE O'NEILL Forget the Past. Doubt the Future. Love the Present.
BROKEN I stopped and gazed on the little dull man who was being paid to be a teacher of teachers. I turned ...
BURL IVES I majored in English in college, ... but whenever I had doubts when I was writing, I'd always call N...
BETTY WHITE I kissed her cheek then, because I feared to do it and though commonsense may occasionally bind me, ...
MARK LAWRENCE They say that time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
MARK LAWRENCE A Dark time comes.
My time.
If it offends you.
Stop Me.
MARK LAWRENCE Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
FRANCIS BACON Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
FRANCIS BACON Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
SIR FRANCIS BACON The Doktor was an old man. When he was a kid, his Dad bought him a chemistry set. He never played wi...
CHRISTINA ENGELA A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW I first adventure, follow me who list / And be the second English satirist.
JOSEPH HALL I started writing it in 2002 and kept writing and kept writing and kept writing. This is a different...
DANIEL POUND The email, written in broken English and with bizarre claims, is a particularly obvious example of o...
ADAM BANKER People speak broken Swahili on purpose. Business people for instance will speak Sheng – a mixture ...
ENOCK MAREGESI I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper repor...
JENNIFER WEINER Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. He had the two wards of the fucking Marshal of the fucking Southern Pr...
ILONA ANDREWS One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken...
LEO TOLSTOY A man whose heart gets broken easily finds his mind awakened.
ANUJ SOMANY Anger makes dull men witty -- but it keeps them poor.
FRANCIS BACON Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.
FRANCIS BACON Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.
ELIZABETH I Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.
ELIZABETH I OF ENGLAND While I wasn't very good at much else in school, in my creative-writing classes or when we had t...
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull. This is not always easy to achieve.
DEAN ACHESON Writing in English was a major challenge. I didn't want other songwriters to write for me. I wanted ...
SHAKIRA By his father he is English, by his mother he is Americanto my mind the blend which makes the perfec...
MARK TWAIN The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and th...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and th...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY Writing in English was a major challenge. I didn't want other songwriters to write for me. I wan...
SHAKIRA When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my ...
DANIEL ALARCON Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man. -King John. Act iii. S...
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE What's lower than writing a man a ticket for sleeping on the street? If he had somewhere else to go,...
GARY JONES Some things just can't be put back together. Some things can never be fixed. Two broken pieces can't...
JAMIE FORD Hair is the first thing. And teeth the second. Hair and teeth. A man got those two things he's g...
JAMES BROWN . . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a might...
WILLIAM STYRON By his father he is English, by his mother he is American - to my mind the blend which makes the per...
MARK TWAIN Soybeans really need an uplift, being on the dull side, but, like dull people, respond readily to th...
IRMA S. ROMBAUER You deserve to be with somebody, who knows you're the one, from that very first moment he lays eyes ...
C. JOYBELL C. There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world tod...
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In m...
F. SIONIL JOSE I never had a dull moment at Detroit.
CHARLES LINDBERGH I thought I would write a love letter. But then, I wrote a book." - Suzy Davies, on "Johari's Window
SUZY DAVIES Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.
EMMA GOLDMAN Joe McGinniss will be remembered as a talented man. He changed political writing forever in 1968. We...
ROGER AILES A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.
MARCUS GARVEY Nineteen was the first time I really had a real relationship, really fell in love, really had my hea...
RO JAMES The first place we went was Vienna, and the first player we tried out was Toni Fritsch. He had a har...
GIL BRANDT The protagonist in 'Deacon Blues' is a triple-L loser - an L-L-L Loser. It's not so much...
WALTER BECKER Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor. -Elizabeth 1.
ELIZABETH 1 The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for pub...
RAYMOND CHANDLER When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
STANLEY KUBRICK

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 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 I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV