27 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov about Writing
- Author Vladimir Nabokov
-
Quote
And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
- Tags
- Share
- Author Vladimir Nabokov
-
Quote
Написанная мысль меньше давит, хотя иная – как раковая опухоль: выразишь, вырежешь, и опять нарастает хуже прежнего.
- Tags
- Share
- Author Vladimir Nabokov
-
Quote
The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.
- Tags
- Share
- Author Vladimir Nabokov
-
Quote
I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.
- Tags
- Share
- Author Vladimir Nabokov
-
Quote
The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.
- Tags
- Share
- Author Vladimir Nabokov
-
Quote
Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.
- Tags
- Share
- Author Vladimir Nabokov
-
Quote
Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
- Tags
- Share
- Author Vladimir Nabokov
-
Quote
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
- Tags
- Share
- Author Vladimir Nabokov
-
Quote
No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.
- Tags
- Share