942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.

If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.

Memory overshadows the present and dims the future "into something thicker than its usual pea soup."

He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.