Top 43 Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

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

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

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.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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

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.

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 think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

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