64 quotes
This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious.
Pale Fire (1962)
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
Strong Opinions (1973)
Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life.
Speak, Memory (1951)
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Lolita (1955)
To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutary chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
Strong Opinions (1973)
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Speak, Memory (1951)
The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.
Bend Sinister (1963)
I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.
Strong Opinions (1973)
"What!" cried Bretwit in candid surprise, "They know at home that His Majesty has left Zembla?"
Pale Fire (1962)
I don't think in any language. I think in images.
Strong Opinions (1973)
The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.
Lectures on Literature (1980)
What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
Lolita (1955)
True art is above false honor.
Pale Fire (1962)
Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)
Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
What Is the Sangha?: The Nature of Spritual Community (2001)
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss
Poems that take a thousand years to die
But ape the immortality of this
Red label on a little butterfly.
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.
Pale Fire (1962)
Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.