942 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

With a heavy heart I left the house and walked through the spotted blaze of the sun to my car. Two other cars were parked on both sides of it, and I had some trouble squeezing out.

I have rewritten – often several times – every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved, was gone, but I kept looking for her – long after I had left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn’t heal.

As it happens with many people who do not trouble about religion in the ordinary trend of life, I hastily invented a soft, warm, tear-misty God, and whispered an informal prayer. Let me get there in time, let him hold out till I come, let him tell me his secret. Now it was all snow: the glass had grown a grey beard.

The more gifted and talkative one’s characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls... There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist.

In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future?

I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling.