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Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian-American novelist and entomologist. His first nine novels were in Russian, but he achieved international prominence after he began writing English prose.

Nabokov's Lolita , his most noted novel in English, was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels; Pale Fire was ranked 53rd on the same list, and his memoir, Speak, Memory , was listed eighth on the publisher's list of the 20th century's greatest nonfiction. He was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times.

Nabokov was an expert lepidopterist and composer of chess problems.

✵ 10. April 1899 – 2. July 1977
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Vladimir Nabokov: 193 quotes232 likes

Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

“I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.”

Vladimir Nabokov

On Sigmund Freud, as quoted in Sigmund Says: And Other Psychotherapists' Quotes (2006) edited by Bernard Nisenholz, p. 6 ISBN 0595396593

“I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Look at the Harlequins! (1974).

“To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena — all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Letter to his sister Elena Sikorski (1945); in Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000) Edited and annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, p. 387.

“No free man needs a God; but was I free?”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962)

“Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O. K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Transparent Things

Transparent Things (1972), Ch. 24.

“You have hal…… real bad, chum.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962)

“Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”

Vladimir Nabokov

Look at the Harlequins! (1974).

“True art is above false honor.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962)

“In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Bend Sinister

Source: Bend Sinister (1963), p. x.

“Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Lolita (1955)

“As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.”

Vladimir Nabokov

As quoted at Penn State University Libraries http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/wlolita.htm. <br class="br">On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956)

“The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance ("Good Readers and Good Writers", p. 3).”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Literature

Lectures on Literature (1980)

“The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962)

“I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962)

“Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

“A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said "full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

“What moment in that gradual decay
Does resurrection choose? What year?
Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?
Are some less lucky, or do all escape?
A syllogism; other men die
But I am not another: therefore I'll not die.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962)

“In due time history will have denounced everybody.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962)

“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)

“This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962)

“After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct.”

Vladimir Nabokov

As quoted in &quot;Nabokov&#x27;s Love Affairs&quot; by R. W. Flint http://www.powells.com/review/2003_07_17.html in The New Republic (17 June 1957). <br class="br">On a Book Entitled Lolita (1956)

“For we die every day; oblivion thrives”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962)