Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Unfortunately his urge to write had suddenly petered out and he did not know what to do with himself. He was not sleepy having slept after dinner. The brandy only added to the nuisance. He was a big heavy man of the hairy sort with a somewhat Beethovenlike face. He had lost his wife in November. He had taught philosophy. He was exceedingly virile. His name was Adam Krug.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

452. “And yet I shall try again: “they are murdering me!“ – all right, all together once more: “they are murdering me!” and again: “murdering”... I want to write this in such a way that you will cover your ears, your membranaceous, simian ears that you hide under strands of beautiful feminine hair – but I know them, I see them, I pinch them, the cold little things, I worry them with my fingers to somehow warm them, bring them to life, render them human, force them to hear me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

453. “The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

454. “Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

455. “The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

456. “There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch – mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called “powerful” novel – full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

457. “Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

458. “I was always lonely and I am lonely still.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

459. “A red backless slipper slowly slid off her foot... and Franz, bending down after it, plunged softly into dark slumber.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

460. “Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man’s fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thug in New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat of their Timekeeper’s stopwatch.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

461. “Oh no, I do not gloat over my own person, I do not get all hot wrestling with my soul in a darkened room; I have no desires, save the desire to express myself – in defiance of all the world’s muteness.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

462. “In those years, that marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae, interstellar gaps and all the rest of the awesome show provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic, as if I were hanging from earth upside down on the brink of infinite space, with terrestrial gravity still holding me by the heels but about to release me any moment.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

463. “She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

464. “Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality – the deception was bearable.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

465. “He began with the day’s copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

466. “The worst madman is the one who fails to consider the possibility of somebody else being mad too.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

467. “I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

468. “Memory overshadows the present and dims the future “into something thicker than its usual pea soup.””

— Vladimir Nabokov

469. “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

470. “Now the colored pencils in more detail.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

471. “But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

472. “Lighted advertisements went running up dark red facades and dissipating again. He would pass girls; he would turn to look; but the prettier the face, the harder it was to take the plunge.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

473. “Nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a Base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

474. “One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shudderings of the still unclothed thought clamouring for them on this side of the abyss. He.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

475. “With a heavy heart I left the house and walked through the spotted blaze of the sun to my car. Two other cars were parked on both sides of it, and I had some trouble squeezing out.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

476. “To the sound of this voice, to the music of the chessboard’s evil lure, Luzhin recalled, with the exquisite, moist melancholy peculiar to recollections of love, a thousand games that he had played in the past... There were combinations, pure and harmonious, where thought ascended marble stairs to victory; there were tender stirrings in one corner of the board, and a passionate explosion, and the fanfare of the Queen going to its sacrificial doom.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

477. “The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale’s white church tower when I looked around me for the last time.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

478. “I put everything into my poetry that I should have put into my life, and now it’s too late for me to start all over again. The only thought that occurs to me at the moment is that in the final reckoning it’s better to have been sanguine by temperament, a man of action, and if you must get drunk do it properly and smash the place up.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

480. “Caress the details, the divine details. In high art and pure science detail is everything.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

481. “You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

482. “The determinate scheme by stripping the sunrise of it’s surprise would erase all sunrays.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

483. “Knight seemed to him to be constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

484. “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

485. “What further concentration is needed, what added intensity must one’s gaze attain, for the brain to enslave the visual image of a person?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

486. “One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

487. “But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

488. “The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

489. “With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a grey neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

490. “I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

491. “No wonder tobacco shops have a predilection for corners, for.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

492. “Van was positive that not once during a month of love-making had he failed to take all necessary precautions, sometimes rather bizarre, but incontestably trustworthy, and had lately acquired a sheath-like contraceptive device that in Ladore county only barbershops, for some odd but ancient reason, were allowed to sell.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

493. “An author’s fondest dream is to turn the reader into a spectator; is this ever attained?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

494. “I think it is all a matter of love...”

— Vladimir Nabokov

495. “Palm trees are all right only in mirages.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

496. “She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

497. “Kisses, my love, deep ones, to the point of fainting-.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

498. “Let me add, just in case, that experts on literary “schools” should wisely refrain this time from casually dragging in “the influence of German Impressionists”: I do not know German and have never read the Impressionists – whoever they are.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

499. “Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought – and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

500. “It isn’t possible. I cannot imagine it. Come on over here, you foolish little doe, and tell me on what day I shall die.”

— Vladimir Nabokov