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Vladimir Nabokov [1899-1977] American

Rank: 10
Novelist

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian-American novelist and entomologist. His first nine novels were in Russian, and he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose.

Imagination, Art, Death, Dreams, Funny, Great, Life, Love, Music, Nature, Poetry, Power, Society, Teacher, Time, War

Quote	Tags	Rank
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.	Nature	101
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.	Dreams, Imagination	102
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.		103
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.		104
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.		105
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.	Love	106
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.		107
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.	Death, Great, Life	108
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.	Imagination	109
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.		110
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.		111
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.	Funny	112
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.		113
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.		114
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.	Teacher	115
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.	Music	116
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.		117
Caress the detail, the divine detail.		118
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.	Art, Society	119
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.	Art, Power	120
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.	War	121
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.		122
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.		123
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.		124
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.		125
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.		126
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.		201
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.		202
There is only one school of literature - that of talent.		203
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.		204
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.		205
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.		206
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.	Imagination	207
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.		208
I confess, I do not believe in time.	Time	209
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.		210
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.	Poetry	211
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.		212
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.		213
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.		214
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.		215
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.		216
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.		217

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