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Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

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
Quite
Worship
Shoulder
Read
Certainly
Seats
Tingle
Science
Highest
Evolve
Shiver
Art
Behinds
Shoulders
Evolving
Form
Pure
Artistic
Attained
Littles
Behind
Delight
Spine
Little
Emotion
Although
Blades
Mind
Humanity
Minds
Seat

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.
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Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.
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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
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There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
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The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
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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.
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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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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.
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Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
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And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.
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All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.
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It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
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There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
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