Top 500 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would – invariably, with icy precision – plump for the former.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

402. “Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

403. “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

404. “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

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. “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

407. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

410. “Genius is non-conformity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

417. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

439. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

441. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

443. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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445. “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

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

449. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

450. “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