Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

About Vladimir Nabokov:

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian-American novelist. While Nabokov's first nine novels were in Russian, he later rose to international prominence as a writer of English prose. He also made serious contributions as a lepidopterist and chess composer.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort.

Vladimir Nabokov

Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being -- not a constant state -- that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciou...

Vladimir Nabokov

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centur...

Vladimir Nabokov

The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.

Vladimir Nabokov

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

Vladimir Nabokov

She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of ...

Vladimir Nabokov

And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the recognized arts. She had never been in close contact with such peopl...

Vladimir Nabokov

A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

Vladimir Nabokov

Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.

Vladimir Nabokov

That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, wh...

Vladimir Nabokov

They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kisse...

Vladimir Nabokov

I notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist ...

Vladimir Nabokov

The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

Vladimir Nabokov

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed — then its love...

Vladimir Nabokov

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. I...

Vladimir Nabokov

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

Vladimir Nabokov

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

Vladimir Nabokov

He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little...

Vladimir Nabokov

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in ...

Vladimir Nabokov

We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always br...

Vladimir Nabokov

His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward ...

Vladimir Nabokov

Author Bio

  • NameVladimir Nabokov
  • DescriptionRussian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor
  • BornApril 22, 1899
  • DiedJuly 2, 1977
  • CountryRussian Empire; United States Of America
  • ProfessionNovelist; Linguist; Poet; Writer; Zoologist; Translator; Playwright; Autobiographer; Educationist
  • WorksThe Defense; The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight; Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship