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?
- Ayn Rand Russian-born American Novelist
- Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
- Leo Rosten American Humorist
- Igor Stravinsky Russian-born American Composer
- Vladimir Horowitz Russian-born American Pianist
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- William Dean Howells American Writer, Critic
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Ken Kesey American Novelist
- Bernard Berenson American Art Critic
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