Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov (Russian-born American Novelist)

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899–1977) was a Russian-American novelist and zoologist. He is most famous for the novel Lolita (1955,) which many regard as the defining American novel of the postwar period.

Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg into an aristocratic family. His first literary work was an anthology of poems printed privately when he was 17. During the Russian Revolution, his family escaped south to Yalta with few belongings. Nabokov later attended Trinity College in Cambridge, where he studied Russian and French literature and played soccer. During his stay at Cambridge, he never visited the university library, preferring an active social life.

Between 1922 and 1940, when he arrived in America, he wrote nine novels in Russian, including The Gift (published serially 1937–38,) which he considered the best of his Russian novels. He also wrote 48 short stories, and essays, reviews, and translations. Fascinated with games and puzzles, he also created chess problems and invented the Russian crossword puzzle.

After the outbreak of World War II, Nabokov arrived in the United States in 1940, with only $100. In 1948, he began a 10-year assignment as a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University, and in 1955 burst on the international scene with the publication of Lolita. Lolita continues to generate controversy over its lascivious central character named Humbert Humbert, who has an improper relationship with a 12-year-old girl he nicknames Lolita. Lolita divided critics, some of whom thought it magnificent and others who thought it offensive. Several public libraries prohibited Lolita. Publications such as the Chicago Tribune refused to review it. Nevertheless, Lolita sold over 100,000 copies in its first three weeks and is now considered a masterpiece of satire and style.

Nabokov’s other important novels include Pnin (1957,) Pale Fire (1962,) and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969.)

Nabokov had a lifelong fascination with butterflies. He published 18 scientific papers on entomology and even worked as a volunteer entomologist for the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Vladimir Nabokov

I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret.
—Vladimir Nabokov

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one’s stomach the separation from terra… these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known… this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Romance

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Memory

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Sleep

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Children, Girls

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers

Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
—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
Topics: Authors & Writing

Curiosity is the first step to insubordination.
—Vladimir Nabokov

Our imagination flies; we are its shadow on the earth.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Imagination

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Solitude

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

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Genius, Snow

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Life and Living

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction

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
Topics: Memory

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
—Vladimir Nabokov

It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Fame

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

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
—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
Topics: Authors & Writing

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Education

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
Topics: Light, Existence

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
Topics: Writing

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
Topics: Imagination

The tiny madman in his padded cell.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Babies

And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Topics: Death

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *