Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

A good laugh is the best pesticide.

My answer to your question ‘Does the writer have a social responsibility?’ is NO. You owe me ten cents, sir.

Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

Those Eggheads are terrible Philistines. A real good head is not oval but round.

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.

I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating ‘real life’ than ‘real life’ is responsible for plagiarizing me.

Like so many ageing college people, Pnin had long ceased to notice the existence of students on campus.

The tiny madman in his padded cell.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

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