Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Although I do not care for the slogan “art for art’s sake”, there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

152. “I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

153. “For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

154. “I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

155. “Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

156. “We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

157. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

158. “I dreamt of you last night – as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

159. “Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

160. “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. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

161. “Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

162. “There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

163. “If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

164. “Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

165. “The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

166. “Oh, Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?”

— Vladimir Nabokov

167. “I am ready to give you all of my blood, if I had to – it’s hard to explain – sounds flat – but that’s how it is.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

168. “Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

169. “By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

170. “The tiny madman in his padded cell.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

171. “My characters are galley slaves.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

172. “And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

173. “You are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought...”

— Vladimir Nabokov

174. “At a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

175. “I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you’ve done to me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

176. “Without you I wouldn’t have moved this way, to speak the language of flowers.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

177. “I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

178. “My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

179. “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy... in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs... the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

180. “Look at this tangle of thorns.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

181. “In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth... and wondering with an immortal Alice at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit... are the highest form of consciousness.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

182. “It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

183. “I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

184. “I love you, I’m waiting for you unbearably.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

185. “The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

186. “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

187. “I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

188. “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.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

189. “Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It’s like passing around samples of sputum.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

190. “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

191. “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

192. “Nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

193. “One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

194. “Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

195. “By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

196. “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

197. “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

198. “Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

199. “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

200. “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.”

— Vladimir Nabokov