Zitat des Tages von Vladimir Nabokov:
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
I confess, I do not believe in time.
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
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.
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
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.
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
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.
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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.
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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.