942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.

And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the first - a dull man writing broken English, the second - a broken man writing dull English.

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!