Vladimir Nabokov

Quotes

• “The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conce...”
• “The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clam...”
• “Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, an...”
• “while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one po...”
• “To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brut...”
• “I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”
• “Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”
• “A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”
• “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”
• “I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.”
• “Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”
• “Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.”
• “Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
• “Light in comparison with darkness is a void.”
• “Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”