Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

• A good laugh is the best pesticide.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

• There exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Friendship

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The tiny madman in his padded cell.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

• And what is death, if not a face at peace – its artistic perfection.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Art
• 

  Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Should, Surprise, Greater

• All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Philosophy

• Light in comparison with darkness is a void.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Philosophy

• I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Like, Would, Reading

• 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.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Good, Writing, Book, Books, Reading

• A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Topics in Art, Society, Work

  Tags in Importance

Vladimir Nabokov (68)

Birth:	22nd April, 1899
Death:	2nd July, 1977
Nationality:	American, Russian
Profession:	Novelist, Professor

About

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian American novelist. Nabokov's first nine novels were in Russian. He then rose to international prominence as a writer of English prose. He also made serious contributions as a lepidopterist and chess composer.

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Births

• 1951 - Pierre Pettigrew
• 1959 - Susan Faludi
• 1882 - Leopold Stokowski
• 1941 - Michael D. Higgins
• 1922 - Nigel Kneale

Deaths

• 1955 - Eugen Herrigel
• 1964 - Ben Hecht
• 1888 - Roscoe Conkling
• 1963 - Margaret Sackville
• 2002 - Thor Heyerdahl