Vladimir Nabokov Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.”

“There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.”

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

“It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.”

“No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.”

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

“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”

“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.”

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

“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.”