Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

402. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

404. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

406. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

416. “Genius is non-conformity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

Featured in: Book Quotes

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “So it went on, that obsession and that despair and that nightmarish impossibility to swindle destiny, until a certain first of April, of all dates.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

442. “Tropes are the dreams of speech.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

447. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

449. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

Featured in: Reading Quotes