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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.

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
Place
Irresponsible
Think
Adore
Thinking
Occupation
Life
Absolutely
Like
Nobody
Crazy
Quite
Happy
Philosophically

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
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A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
Vladimir Nabokov
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My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
Vladimir Nabokov
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in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
Vladimir Nabokov
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He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.
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Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious it has been set free.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be
Vladimir Nabokov
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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
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I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
Vladimir Nabokov
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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.
Vladimir Nabokov