Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

In art there is a need for truth, not sincerity.

Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art - but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life.

The same person is coming through in a different medium.... My art is simple, direct and definite.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

No art can be grafted with success on another art. For though they all profess the same origin, and to proceed from the same stock, yet each has its own peculiar modes both of imitating nature and of deviating from it... The deviation, more especially, will not bear transplantation to another soil.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

I didn’t see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn’t make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it’s art, that’s great, but I’ll let history decide.

There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.

The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it's been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course - you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious - It takes two to be serious.

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.