Vladimir Nabokov

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”

“But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule...”

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.”

“For we die every day; oblivion thrives Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.”

“And speaking of evolution, can we imagine the origin and stepping stones and rejected mutations of Time? Has there ever been a “primitive” form of Time in which, say, the Past was not yet cl...”

“I love you. Infinitely and inexpressibly. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and here I am writing this. My love, my happiness.”

“Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken an...”

“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We...”

“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”

“We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and rip...”

“But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancient...”

“The village schoolmaster took us for instructive walks ('what you hear is the sound of a scythe being sharpened' ; 'that field there will be given a rest next season ';'oh, just a small bird...”

“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.”

“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...”

“There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.”

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

“All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.”

“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...”

“Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.”

“Caress the detail, the divine detail.”