30 Quotes About Nabokov

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

what stars, what thought and sadness up above, and what ignorance below.

there is the rare kind of time in which I live - the pause, the hiatus, when the heart is like a feather....

I know something. I know something. But expression of it comes so hard !

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself- in defiance of all the world's muteness.

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.

There are few poets today who can equal, in their esthetic exploitation of language, in their depth of commitment to their medium, in their range of conceptual understanding, in the purity of their closed forms, the work of Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Broch, Gaddis, or Calvino, or any of half-a-dozen extraordinarily gifted South Americans.