Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
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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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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
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Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
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It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
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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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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
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I confess, I do not believe in time.
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It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.