“Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest “warmth”Mwhich may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“The quality of this novel is the way the plot is treated and not the plot itself.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstacy) is the norm.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“The novel is not “a crazy quilt of bits”; it is a logical sequence of psychological events: the movements of stars may seem crazy to the simpleton, but wise men know the comets come back.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“To begin with, let us take the following motto (not especially for this chapter, but generally): Literature is Love. Now we can continue.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“Pushkin’s composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style, and it is from this flowered rim that I have surveyed its seep of Arcadian country, the serpentine gleam of its imported brooks, the miniature blizzards imprisoned in round crystal, and the many-hued levels of literary parody blending in the melting distance.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“I think it was your cherry pies.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“He made for the door, automatically resuming his glasses and leaving in front of her, on the floor, his right slipper in token of his speedy return. Then, his desire exposed and his eyes wicked behind their strong lenses, he attempted to push her toward the bed.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“I am not concerned with so-called “sex” at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“I wonder where you got your statistics when you say that Theirs executed more people than did the Terreur? I object to this kind of excuse for two reasons. Although from a Christian’s or a mathematician’s point of view a thousand people killed in battle a hundred years ago equal a thousand people killed in a battle of today, historically the first definition is “slaughter” and the second “some casualties.” Secondly: one cannot compare the slapdash suppression, however abominable, of a revolt with the thorough application of a system of murder.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
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“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.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
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“The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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“Fathers and Sons is not only the best of Turgenev’s novels, it is one of the most brilliant novels of the nineteenth century. Turgenev managed to do what he intended to do, to create a male character, a young Russian, who would affirm his–that character’s–absence of introspection and at the same time would not be a journalist’s dummy of the socialistic type.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Character
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“Of the other characters in the book there is, likewise, little to say. The most endearing one is obviously the old Captain MaksimMaksimich, stolid, gruff, naively poetical, matter-of- fact, simple-hearted, and completely neurotic.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Character
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“No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has….”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Character
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“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Imagination
