Vladimir Nabokov

I confess, I do not believe in time.

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

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

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 administrative detail.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

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

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

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

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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

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.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.