Vladimir Nabokov – 12 Quotes

12 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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

– Vladimir Nabokov

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.

– Vladimir Nabokov

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

– Vladimir Nabokov

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

– Vladimir Nabokov

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

– Vladimir Nabokov

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

– Vladimir Nabokov

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.

– Vladimir Nabokov

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

– Vladimir Nabokov

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.

– Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

– Vladimir Nabokov

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

– Vladimir Nabokov

I confess, I do not believe in time.

– Vladimir Nabokov