942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust

It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.

And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods. . .