Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

" Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

" Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" Genius is an African who dreams up snow. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" There is only one school of literature - that of talent. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" Caress the detail, the divine detail. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

" I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" 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

" There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" I confess, I do not believe in time. "

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

" Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know. "

Vladimir Nabokov