Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

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.

The square root of I is I.

My God died young. Theolatry i found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs God; but was I free?

And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.

Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.

Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes 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. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.

Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then - not in dreams - but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

"My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed."
"... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here."
"There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita.

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane...

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.