942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:...Beneath the skyOf my America to sighFor one locality in Russia.(a passage not for 'general readers' but for 'idiots')

The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Only a Chinaman or a retarded child can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp, stomp, here I am, stick me on.

Не все ли равно какой? Ведь меня нет, — есть только тысячи зеркал, которые меня отражают. С каждым новым знакомством растет население призраков, похожих на меня. Они где-то живут, где-то множатся. Меня же нет.

what stars, what thought and sadness up above, and what ignorance below.

there is the rare kind of time in which I live - the pause, the hiatus, when the heart is like a feather....

I know something. I know something. But expression of it comes so hard !

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