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Vladimir Nabokov
58 quotes
“And there are things that are hard to talk about—you'll rub off their marvelous pollen at the touch of a word.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to then-girlfriend Véra (26 July 1923); in Letters to Véra (2014), p 3.
“What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Despair [Отчаяние (Otchayanie)] (1936).
“Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Discovery" (December 1941); published as "On Discovering a Butterfly" in The New Yorker (15 May 1943); also in Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000) Edited and annotated by Brian Boyd and …
“To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena — all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his sister Elena Sikorski (1945); in Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000) Edited and annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, p. 387.
“The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Problems of translation (1955).
“What is translation? On a platter A poet's pale and glaring head, A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter, And profanation of the dead.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Translating 'Eugene Onegin'", lines 1–4. Poems (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959) p. 37
“Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Transparent Things (1972), Ch. 24.
“Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Look at the Harlequins! (1974).
“I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Look at the Harlequins! (1974).
“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Herbert Gold, The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, 4th series (1977), p. 107 -->
“Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in What Is the Sangha?: The Nature of Spritual Community (2001) by Sangharakshita, p. 136.
“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) by Azar Nafisi
“I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Sigmund Freud, as quoted in Sigmund Says: And Other Psychotherapists' Quotes (2006) edited by Bernard Nisenholz, p. 6
“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Nabokov conducted on September 25, 27, 28, 29, 1966, at Montreux, Switzerland and published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, spring 1967.
“The fact that since my youth – I was 19 when I left Russia — my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Playboy 1964 interview
“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. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The term "bend sinister" means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Nabokov's Love Affairs" by R. W. Flint in The New Republic (17 June 1957).
“As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No free man needs a God; but was I free?”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What moment in that gradual decay Does resurrection choose? What year? Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape? Are some less lucky, or do all escape? A syllogism; other men die But I am not another: therefore I'll not die.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For we die every day; oblivion thrives Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But no aorta could report regret. A sun of rubber was convulsed and set; And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in dialogue in the movie Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
“You have hal...... real bad, chum.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Solitude is the playfield of Satan.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What!" cried Bretwit in candid surprise, "They know at home that His Majesty has left Zembla?”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“True art is above false honor.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can at last describe his tie, an Easter gift from a dressy butcher, his brother in law in Onhava: imitation silk, colour chocolate brown barred with red, the end tucked into the shirt between the second and third buttons — a Zemblan fashion of the nineteen thirties.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In due time history will have denounced everybody.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From a BBC Interview (1962), p. 14
“I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak’s melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered “masterpieces,” or at least what journalists call “great books,” is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source