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Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.

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
Universe
Beneath
Reality
Flying
Thought
Suddenly
Human
Mathematics
Humans
Star
Acrobat
Like
Filled
Trapeze
Stars
Stretched
Working
Noticing

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Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
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...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
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He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle.
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I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.
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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.
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I think it is all a matter of love.
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When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
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Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.
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I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
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I don't think in any language. I think in images.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.
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