A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov
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
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Vladimir Nabokov
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
Vladimir Nabokov
I confess, I do not believe in time.
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
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Vladimir Nabokov
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
Vladimir Nabokov
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
Related Authors
Ernest Hemingway, Chuck Palahniuk, Richard Bach, Elie Wiesel, William Faulkner, J. D. Salinger, Toni Morrison, Herman Melville, Saul Bellow
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