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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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
Flies
Shadow
Imagination
Art
Earth
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.
Vladimir Nabokov
Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.
Vladimir Nabokov
I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
Vladimir Nabokov
The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
Vladimir Nabokov
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
Vladimir Nabokov
Genius is finding the invisible link between things.
Vladimir Nabokov
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
I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
Vladimir Nabokov
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
Vladimir Nabokov
And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy...What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me-my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift...I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing-yes, really absorbing! ... I am happy-yes, happy!
Vladimir Nabokov
And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
Vladimir Nabokov
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
Vladimir Nabokov
The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.
Vladimir Nabokov
A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.
Vladimir Nabokov
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
Vladimir Nabokov
I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
Vladimir Nabokov
There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
Vladimir Nabokov
Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
Vladimir Nabokov
The tiny madman in his padded cell.
Vladimir Nabokov
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
Vladimir Nabokov
