3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov 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.
3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov 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.
3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov 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.
3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
