Vladimir Nabokov

"Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds."

"Ink, a Drug."

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him."

"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"

"I dreamt of you last night - as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me."

"I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists."

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

"I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again–and 'oh, no,' Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure–all would be shattered."

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

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

"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."

"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 confess, I do not believe in time."

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

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

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

"The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea."

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

"It is interesting to ponder the fact that there is no real difference between what the Western Fascists wanted of literature and what the Bolsheviks want. Let me quote: "The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed.” Thus spoke one of the big Nazis, Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture in Hitler's Germany. Another quote: “Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan.” Thus spoke Lenin. Both of these are textual quotations, and their similitude would have been highly diverting had not the whole thing been so very sad."

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."