Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

You cannot understand Russia if you look at her through Western eyes.

Let's be honest. We don't take rap serious the way other cultures take rock-n-roll, they take country. They artists are being loved.

In Germany, a certain artistic sense is fairly common, but the artist's sense is foreign there.

You don't accept your weaknesses the same way that you love the weaknesses of another artist, because when they make mistakes they don't look like weaknesses.

Russia is a place of great culture. If you've read Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov...the culture of the great Russian literature is amazing. The human narrative you get out of "War and Peace" is universal.

For many artists fame complements the value of creative self-expression. Ludwig van Beethoven loved composing music, but he probably would have enjoyed it less if no one ever listened to the product.

RUSSIAN, n. A person with a Caucasian body and a Mongolian soul. A Tartar Emetic.

But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.

So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world: and he will bear witness for his country-men at the last judgement of the nations.

This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist. . . . Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. . . . Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out.

I'm a fan of the mythos of Atlanta hip-hop, and it's something I grew up imagining. It was very interesting to get there and see the real version of this world and then reconcile the differences between what's presented as Atlanta hip-hop to the rest of the world and what the real, breathing version of it is.

That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.

The greatest books in Russian literature are satires. Gogol's Dead Souls, for example, is a very over-the-top satire about life in Russia. I think it's the thing we do best.

In the pop world, instead of saying I want to get an album by such and such a group, it's I like this particular tune and that one I like less. I think it's much better to get involved with an artist instead of riding up and down the works you like and disregard the works you don't like.

One journalist said that everybody in Russia is miserable. Russia is a terrible place. And I'm going to end up miserable and I'm going to be a drunk and I'm never going to do anything. I don't drink. I've never been drunk in my life. And they talk about Russia like it's the worst place on earth. Russia's great.

We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical.

When you're reading Chekov, you're in this world that he's created. I never would have created that world. I don't know anything about that time period or that setting or those groups of people or what those experiences were, but oh my gosh, it's amazing to daydream on it and put yourself there.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

But, Christ, there's a difference between exotic and foreign, isn't there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me.

There's a big difference between how the Anglo-Saxon world views India, or viewed India, and the way Europe views India.

Only in Russia poetry is respected - it gets people killed.

The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.

The only reward one should offer an artist is to buy his work.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

The artists that I love- whether painters or filmmakers- it's because something resonates in me because I've felt it.