Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

- Vladimir Nabokov

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

- 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

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.

- Vladimir Nabokov

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.

- Vladimir Nabokov

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

- Vladimir Nabokov

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.

- 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

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

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

- Vladimir Nabokov

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

- Vladimir Nabokov

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

- Vladimir Nabokov

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

- Vladimir Nabokov

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

- Vladimir Nabokov

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

- Vladimir Nabokov

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

- Vladimir Nabokov

It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

- Vladimir Nabokov

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

- Vladimir Nabokov

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

- Vladimir Nabokov

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

- Vladimir Nabokov