Vladimir Nabokov

The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual;" and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

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.

The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

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.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.