942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Nobody strolled and laughed on the sidewalks as relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow, rotting Europe.

I appeal to parents: never, never say, "Hurry up," to a child. (62)

She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.

The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.

...A superficial reader of Proust's work- rather a contradiction in terms since a superficial reader will get so bored, so engulfed in his own yawns, that he will never finish the book- [the] inexperienced reader, let us say... will probably conclude that the main action of the book is a series of parties; for example, a dinner occupies a hundred and fifty pages, a soirée half a volume.

Dostoevski's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity—all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of "sinning their way to Jesus" or, as a Russian author Ivan Bunin put it more bluntly, "spilling Jesus all over the place.

The repetition of words and phrases, the intonation of obsession, the hundred percent banality of every word, the vulgar soapbox eloquence mark these elements of Dostoevski's style.

Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev. This is rather like grading students' papers and no doubt Dostoevski and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.

Let us not look for the soul of Russia in the Russian novel: let us look for the individual genius. Look at the masterpiece, and not at the frame—and not at the faces of other people looking at the frame.