Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

Caress the detail, the divine detail.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

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

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

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