Quote

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

Vladimir Nabokov

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Vladimir Nabokov
Age: 77 †
Born: 1899
Born: January 1
Died: 1977
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Chess Composer
Chess Player
Journalist
Lepidopterist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
St. Petersburg
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vladimir Sirin
Vl. Sirin
Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin
V. Sirin
Always
Murderer
Prose
Count
Fancy
Murder
Style

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Image
while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
We think not in words but in shadows of words.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Dear Jesus, do something.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
Vladimir Nabokov