942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

I dreamt of you last night - as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.

Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

What I am thinking of is the man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite because his curiosity surpasses his courage. Nothing will keep him back.

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.