14 Vladimir Nabokov Quotes on Literature

Vladimir Nabokov quotes on literature

2. 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.

4. I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier.

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

8. I think he's crude, I think he's medieval, and I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don't have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don't see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.

12. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

13. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

14. After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct.

25. If I say that Nabokov, who was educated in England... turns out to be a master of English prose - the most extraordinary phenomenon of the kind since Conrad - this is likely to sound incredible. If I say that Nabokov is something like Proust, something like Franz Kafka, and, probably something like Gogol, I shall suggest an imitative patchwork, where Nabokov is as completely himself as any of these others - a man with a unique sensibility and a unique story to tell.

26. Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book - all right then - a great book.

27. Lolita is pornography, and we do not plan to review it.

28. The political barbarism of the century made him an exile, a wanderer, a Hotelmensch, not only from his Russian homeland but from the matchless Russian tongue in which his genius would have found its unforced idiom... But I have no hesitation in arguing that this poly-linguistic matrix is the determining fact of Nabokov's life and art. But whereas so many other language exiles clung desperately to the artifice of their native tongue or fell silent, Nabokov moved into successive languages like a travelling potentate...

29. Lolita is one of our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision, an unforgettable work, Nabokov's best (though not most characteristic) work, a wedding of Swiftian satirical vigor with the kind of minute, loving patience that belongs to a man infatuated with the visual mysteries of the world.

30. All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny, even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all.

31. Some say the Great American Novel is 'Huckleberry Finn,' some say it's 'The Jungle,' some say it's 'The Great Gatsby.' But my vote goes to the tale with the maximum lust, hypocrisy and obsession - the view of America that could only have come from an outsider - Nabokov's 'Lolita. ... 'Those who bought 'Lolita' looking for mere prurient kicks must surely have been disappointed. 'Lolita' is dark and twisted all right, but it's also a corruptly beautiful love story of two tragically alike, id-driven souls... What makes 'Lolita' a work of greatness isn't that its title has become ingrained in the vernacular, isn't that was a generation ahead of America in fetishizing young girls. No, it is the writing, the way Nabokov bounces around in words like the English language is a toy trunk, the sly wit, the way it's devastating and cynical and heartbreaking all at once. Poor old Dolly Haze might not have grown up very well, but 'Lolita' forever remains a thing of timeless beauty.