Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Literature is about telling stories.

I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.

Metaphors are an interesting example of creating magic in prose.

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

A story is not only meaning, it's music as well.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare... As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

When you're telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it's like an impressionistic painting - you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

It draws you in and creates pictures, so what I do is almost like a talking story book.

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

When you allegorize, you're gonna get everybody saved somehow.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.