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
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. Vladimir Nabokov
I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name. Vladimir Nabokov
A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. Vladimir Nabokov
Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one – with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between. Vladimir Nabokov
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. Vladimir Nabokov
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. Vladimir Nabokov
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. Vladimir Nabokov
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. Vladimir Nabokov
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. Vladimir Nabokov
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. Vladimir Nabokov
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained. Vladimir Nabokov