Quote

Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.

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
Message
Scrawl
Back
Messages
Crank
Without
Market
Yard
Children
Imagination
Farther
Never
Child
Yards
Knowledge
Fence
Simple
Primitive
Art
Leads

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I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
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Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
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I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
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A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
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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.
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Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
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Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
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My answer to your question'Does the writer have a social responsibility?' is NO.You owe me ten cents, sir.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.
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There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.
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My characters are galley slaves.
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