Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

402. “He had liked her enormously, and he loved Krug with the same passion that a big sleek long-flewed hound feels for the high-booted hunter who reeks of the marsh as he leans towards the red fire. Krug could take aim at a flock of the most popular and sublime human thoughts and bring down a wild goose any time. But he could not kill death.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

403. “As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform... them... that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

404. “No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

405. “Actually, observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained,- Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

406. “What are these hopes, and who is this savior?” “Imagination,” replied Cincinnatus.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

407. “She had imagination – the muscle of the soul – and her imagination was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality. She possessed, too, that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier. And finally she was blest with a keen sense of humour. No wonder she fitted into his life so well.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

408. “I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

409. “The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

410. “Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

411. “The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

412. “Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

413. “I am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

414. “Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

415. “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

416. “Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

417. “Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

418. “Genius is non-conformity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

419. “Only experts, for experts, should probe a mind’s misery.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

420. “Yes, I think that of all his books this is my favourite one. I don’t know whether it makes one “think,” and I don’t much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like its manners.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

421. “To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would – invariably, with icy precision – plump for the former.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

422. “Beaming and melting in smiles of benevolence and self-effacement, they sidled up and plumped down next to Lucette, who turned to them with her last, last, last free gift of staunch courtesy that was stronger than failure and death.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

423. “Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

424. “A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

425. “I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

426. “Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

427. “Thus a man looking through a tremendous telescope does not see the cirri of an Indian summer above his charmed orchard, but does see, as my regretted colleague, the late Professor Alexander Ivanchenko, twice saw, the swarming of hesperozoa in a humid valley of the planet Venus.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

428. “Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

429. “It’s exactly my sense of existing – a fragment, a wisp of color.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

430. “No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

431. “Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer’s black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass!”

— Vladimir Nabokov

432. “I don’t read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

433. “Everything he said should be followed by a big sic.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

434. “The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author’s supervision swell gradually with the reader’s lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that – not very appetizing – food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

435. “There are certain trifles I do not forgive. Not having read the required book. Having read it like an idiot.” – John Shade.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

436. “Where, where... ” M’sieur Pierre mimicked him. “You know where. Off to do chop-chop.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

437. “Light in comparison with darkness is a void.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

438. “We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

439. “From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one’s interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

440. “There is only one school: that of talent.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

441. “To her he would surrender the remnants of himself at the first trumpet blast of destiny.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

442. “Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

443. “Tropes are the dreams of speech.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

444. “The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave’, as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “I was proceeding slowly one afternoon through torrents of rain and kept seeing that red ghost swimming and shivering with lust in my mirror, when presently the deluge dwindled to a patter, and then was suspended altogether.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

450. “I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder.”

— Vladimir Nabokov