Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

There's no such thing as post-feminism. It's like saying post-democracy, excuse me, what does that mean? We're nowhere near equality, so the very idea of post-feminism is ridiculous. The same people who 30-40 years ago said the women's movement is not necessary, 'it's going against nature, my wife is not interested' [are] the same people now saying 'well it used to be necessary but not anymore.' The very invention of the word post-feminism is the current form of resistance.

Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much.

You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw.

Who cares what the color means? How do you know what he meant to say? I mean, did he leave another book called "Symbolism in My Books?" If he didn't, then you could just be making all of this up. Does anyone really think this guy sat down and stuck all kinds of hidden meanings into his story? It's just a story.... But I think you are making all of this symbolism stuff up. I don't believe any of it.

It was inevitable the Titanic was going to set sail, but that doesn't mean it was a good idea to be on it.

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

I want to go to college for literature. I want to be a writer. I mean, I love what I do, but its not all I want to do-be a professional liar for the rest of my life.

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.

If one asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him: It means all that the Constitution of our people, organizing for justice, for liberty, and for happiness, meant. Our flag carries American ideas, American history and American feelings. This American flag was the safeguard of liberty. It was an ordinance of liberty by the people, for the people. That it meant, that it means, and, by the blessing of God, that it shall mean to the end of time!

Because one of the properties of music is to entertain and to, I don't mean this lightly, distract us from the things that pull us down. Music should be not only a source for political ideas but also a source of hope.

Get a job and when you earn a little bit of money, then you can do more good. Then bringing your values doesn't mean you have to compromise yourself. You got to get over this idea that you can't work for a big corporation, or for big oil or bigger pharma, because actually, those are some of the great jobs are and you can do good there.

It is however, difficult to make your narratives relative by yourself. A novelists' work is to provide models to make your narratives relative. If you read my novels then you may feel, "I have the same experience as this narrative", or "I have the same idea as this novel". It means that your narrative and mine sympathize, concord and resonate together.

A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

"Hard" science fiction probes alternative possible futures by means of reasoned extrapolations in much the same way that good historical fiction reconstructs the probable past. Even far-out fantasy can present a significant test of human values exposed to a new environment. Deriving its most cogent ideas from the tension between permanence and change, science fiction combines the diversions of novelty with its pertinent kind of realism.

The idea that we are the gods now, and we are doing things that our ancestors think are god-like is not a rhetorical question. You know what I mean? We really are as gods.

I'm anti-establishment. So all the labels, the reason that I keep joking and rejecting this idea that I'm liberal, well partly that's because I think of myself as a radical, and by that I mean, not even in the terms of Left-Right that you might imagine - but someone who wants to go to the root of problems.

If you take this life to be simply what old religious folks pretend (I mean the effete, gone to seed in a drought, mere human galls stung by the devil once), then all your joy and serenity is reduced to grinning and bearing it. The fact is, you have got to take the world on your shoulders like Atlas, and "put along" with it. You will do this for an idea's sake, and your success will be in proportion to your devotion to ideas. It may make your back ache occasionally, but you will have the satisfaction of hanging it or twirling it to suit yourself.

Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.

American literature has been, and is, singularly deficient in established critics who have anything like a rational conception of their jobs. The majority, initiate in a few of the patent rituals of Aristotle and Quintilian, don the forbidding robes of high priests to Sweetness and Light, and go about their business much as if the idea were to keep all they know to themselves.

Reading means borrowing.

In 15 years or something - I like the idea of just one paparazzo coming out and trying to get a picture, and I just beat the shit out of him. I mean - out of nowhere - when my picture's not even worth...and I've spent all my money, so you can't sue me!