Vladimir Nabokov Quotes (0-)

“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.”

“Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-ordinary memorist.”

“Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.”

“Genius still means to me, in my Russian, fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.”

“A book is like a trunk tightly packed with things. At the customs an official's hand plunges perfunctorily into it, but he who seeks treasures examines every thread.”

“Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.”

“Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”

“No other poet has so often, with such tormented and creative vigilance, looked into the dusk of the beyond.”

“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”

“The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays.”

“... 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.”

“H.G. Wells, a great artist, was my favourite writer when I was a boy. The Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica, The Time Machine, The Country of the Blind, all these stories are far better than anything Bennett, or Conrad, or, in fact, any of Wells' contemporaries would produce. His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasies are superb.”

“Following Nabokov's earlier excellent, offbeat novels (including Pnin, TIME, March 18, 1957), Lolita should give his name its true dimensions and expose a wider U.S. public to his special gift — which is to deal with life as if it were a thing created by a mad poet on a spring night.”

“(The last book you read that made you furious?) Nabokov’s lecture on Jane Austen documented in “Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature,” edited by Fredson Bowers. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov wrote: “I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class.” There’s pride and prejudice for you!”

“(F.J.: You put Nabokov in the category of American literature?) Desai: Of necessity, yes. I have a feeling probably he himself saw himself as an American writer. After all, he deliberately began to write in English-abandoned Russian and wrote in English. I think his richest novels are the very earliest ones, which he wrote in Russian. But I reread Lolita recently and it seemed to me a masterpiece, and it's an American masterpiece.”

“Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?”

“there are two authors I consider my teachers, one on the most realistic side and the other one in the most fantastic side: ...Ursula K. Le Guin...and Nabokov”

“I think some of the greatest writing has been also about writers like Conrad or Nabokov, who have illuminated and given us fresh views about the new countries they adopted. Nabokov's best work was about America, and it was written during his period of exile in this country and later in Switzerland. And I think he could see this America through the eyes of his Russia. And even Russian language glimmers through those amazingly light field scenes in Lolita or his other works. So it is not just that other country that comes to us. This new country is also nourished because language is also a home. And when you change that home and come to a new thing, you'd love to play with it.”

“'''''Lolita'' is one of our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision''', an unforgettable work, Nabokov's best (though not most characteristic) work, a wedding of Swiftian satirical vigor with the kind of minute, loving patience that belongs to a man infatuated with the visual mysteries of the world.”