Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

403. “I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting for her, for her.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

404. “Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

405. “The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

406. “I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

407. “Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

408. “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

412. “Genius is non-conformity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

419. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

431. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

435. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

437. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

439. “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

440. “Tropes are the dreams of speech.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

445. “The Goldsworth castle became particularly solitary after that turning point at dusk which resembles so much the nightfall of the mind. Stealthy.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

446. “I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

447. “The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

448. “When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher – “hoping that I like the book as much as he does” – I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

449. “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

450. “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