FastSaying

[...] and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.


Vladimir Nabokov

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No other photographer had such immediate and intimate access to Nabokov over so many years, ... Vlad...
BRIAN BOYD Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and...
ELLEN OCHOA I'm into books - I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had ...
TARON EGERTON My little cup brims with tiddles.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read...
RUTH BADER GINSBURG I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV ..."offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual"...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV No other photographer had such immediate and intimate access to Nabokov over so many years,
BRIAN BOYD Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And...
JOHN MCWHORTER A lot of people ask for sequels, but what they really want is just to know the characters are happy ...
KRISTAN HIGGINS Humor writing requires a rhythm and timing, as well as some kind of connection to the reader, and I ...
KRISTAN HIGGINS Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country's poets, and among Englis...
JOHN BURROUGHS Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of bein...
ZADIE SMITH The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave
anything out. I have rea...
PAT CONROY Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet tryin...
ROBERT GRAVES Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature ge...
JOHN BURROUGHS I studied English literature in university, and then I went straight into radio.
MIRIAM MARGOLYES My number-one website is brainpickings.org. It opens you up to different authors and gives insights ...
BRIE LARSON After some time he felt for his pipe. It was not broken, and that was something. Then he felt for hi...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature,...
MIRIAM MARGOLYES I did art history and English literature at Newcastle.
PRINCESS EUGENIE OF YORK As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and h...
NATHANIEL PHILBRICK ““In the past people used to make communication in English as simple as possible, so that many p...
JOHN ALEXANDER TRISTRAM I have many influences and poets whose work I love. My personal canon includes Blake, Keats, Dickins...
BRENDA HILLMAN Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.
DAVID LIPSKY One of the teachers said to one of our staff -- 'So I suppose you've stuffed all your religious lite...
KEN HAM One of the best characters in English literature.
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I had some great English teachers. One of my favorite - her name was Linda Janoff - was wonderful an...
RANSOM RIGGS I don't know how it started but someone must have noticed I was always chewing tobacco or smokin...
HANK SAUER I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I'...
KURT VONNEGUT My master's degree was in English literature.
SYLVIA BROWNE The next time you go out to a smoking party, young feller, fill your pipe with that 'ere reflection...
CHARLES DICKENS Vladimir: That passed the time.
Estragon: It would have passed in any case.
Vladimir: Yes, but...
SAMUEL BECKETT There are refineries that are not ready to take the product at the end of the pipe. So it's not just...
BURTON I look at smoking as a crutch, and as an actor I would like strip away as many crutches as possible.
CLAIRE FORLANI Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, d...
ASHWIN SANGHI I went to study English for two reasons. Principally because when I was in university, studying dram...
JAMES CALLIS Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked...
REZA ASLAN I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my lov...
SOPHIA BUSH The cliche is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in cliches, s...
GERALD BRENAN I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and sta...
AZAR NAFISI So in my junior year, I switched to the drama department.
JAMES EARL JONES Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.
RICK YANCEY Western has won so many games where they've been trailing and come back at the end, so I was never c...
JEFF HIRONAKA Where will you be sitting in eternity--smoking or non-smoking?
UNKNOWN In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a lit...
GAEL GARCIA BERNAL Santa Claus wears a Red Suit, He must be a communist. And a beard and long hair, Must be a pacifist....
ARLO GUTHRIE I'm just frustrated by teachers and their lack of patience for children like him.
JENNIFER KHONSARI In the end, I think you really only get as far as you're allowed to get.
GAYLE GARDNER A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so...
VIKTOR E. FRANKL Brighton goes through English teachers like Hogwarts devours Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers.
SHANNON LEE ALEXANDER Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poet...
SUSANNA KAYSEN He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Newer teachers also have a broader perspective on literature.
LARRY JOHANNESSEN English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of in...
MARILYN BUTLER The English kill off all their poets by the time they're forty
D.H. LAWRENCE I went to school to study literature and writing, even though I didn't end up really doing that ...
GABY HOFFMANN Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.
JAMES BROUGHTON Prior to 'Snowpiercer,' I've done many other international project that forced me to be ...
GO AH-SUNG I wrote my first play as extra credit for my fourth grade English class. 'Can Helen Stop Smoking...
T'KEYAH CRYSTAL KEYMAH Many frustrated people try to live their lives as others have defined them.
HENRY CLOUD There are so many stories about injustices that I would like to do, especially about the harmfulness...
JACK KLUGMAN In many ways, 'What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World' is just one b...
TAYLOR MALI All of these factors are important in delaying or preventing daily smoking, but parental smoking is ...
KARL HILL In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do s...
TREVOR NUNN In his Comedy, Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and...
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in En...
LAFCADIO HEARN I was frustrated for a long time with my colleagues in the business school world and with so many ma...
GARY HAMEL I think the teachers are just as excited as the kids. Many teachers told me they had difficulty slee...
ELIZABETH ENGLISH Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell had quite different gifts, and their self-images were quite diffe...
RICHARD M. RORTY The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to know it in any reputable sense of ...
ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH With 'Worst. Person. Ever.' I knew where it started and where it had to end, but I threw Ray...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND I was an English major in college who concentrated in African-American literature and culture. So I ...
JOHN LEGEND Way back in the day, when I first started and had delusions of adequacy as a cartoonist, I would lis...
ALAN MOORE As long as I can remember, [costs] continually increased. Periodically, we switched plans to mitigat...
PAT CONROY We have a host of English teachers in the family. My mum is an English teacher, and so are my dad, m...
ALEXANDRA ADORNETTO There are water lines everywhere, and nobody knows where the pipes are, ... We're digging for the pi...
CARLOMAGNO I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can ...
A. S. BYATT I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it w...
STEPHEN FRY Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed!
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE If Bengali is my mother, then English is my father and friend.
ABHIJIT NASKAR We have had as many as 97 and as few as 27. I'm always prepared with extra teachers because I never ...
INA FAYE PRICE Santa Claus wears a Red Suit, He must be a communist. And a beard and long hair, Must be a pacifist....
ARLO GUTHRIE We have found that the most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful le...
WENDY KOPP Many people, because they're not given follow-up, the medications aren't adjusted ... do end up bein...
DR. RICHARD NAKAMURA The literary community is very rich. The Haitian culture stands out as unique, especially the litera...
DAVID BROWN Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cr...
JULIA GLASS My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to rea...
SANJEEV BHASKAR Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of ...
THEODORA GOSS I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.
TOM STOPPARD Certainly, Continental has taken advantage of pipe and sponsored pipeline projects where we could. A...
HAROLD HAMM I had a hole in my voice. I still do. We call it a hole, but it's an area in the voice where it&...
CECILE MCLORIN SALVANT I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn't a religion maj...
MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL It's a great romantic story with very real people in it and I think it is open to so many interpreta...
ROSAMUND PIKE We don't store it on the property. So, as soon as it comes out of the pipe, it's burned. So, if we h...
BOB COLEMAN

More Vladimir Nabokov

And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especiall...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly rec...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers,...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and ge...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, f...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The tiny madman in his padded cell.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event,...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. -...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Solitude is the playfield of Satan. - Pale Fire, 1962.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to en...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the read...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For m...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the h...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss som...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Caress the detail, the divine detail.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, t...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme met...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before bein...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of he...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the st...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV There was no Lo to behold.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Har...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. Sh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, tr...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily ap...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Words without experience are meaningless.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—En...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their l...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exa...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV And the rest is rust and stardust.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Dear Jesus, do something.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imag...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words
VLADIMIR NABOKOV My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the mos...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
My sin, my soul.
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the to...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Caress the detail, the divine detail
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Genius is an African who dreams up snow
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Other men die; but I Am not another; therefore I'll not die
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the first - a dull man writing broken English, the second - ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic b...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Solitude is the play field of Satan
VLADIMIR NABOKOV [Against whom was it turned? Against whom did he conspire?] Tum-tee-tum. And once more - TUM! ... I ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV - A sentyment staje się uciążliwy. W końcu jest coś nazbyt fizycznego w próbie zachowania czą...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, ban...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, hap...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness....
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in k...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You have to be an artist and a madman...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. Sh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of partin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
VLADIMIR NABOKOV And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poiso...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Ink, a Drug.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything i...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the sa...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apolo...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a derang...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The color of one's creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in ti...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anythin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV but that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remain...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a si...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The road now stretched across open country, and it occured to me - not by way of protest, not as a s...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sen...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bl...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subd...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV My little cup brims with tiddles.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light o...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal v...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
VLADIMIR NABOKOV From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed betwe...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita, luz de mi vida, fuego de mis entrañas. Pecado mío, alma mía. Lo-li-ta: la punta de la len...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon wh...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs throu...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable na...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling
VLADIMIR NABOKOV In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruin...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, ...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV