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.”

“Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”

“Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”

“A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.”

“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.”

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”

“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.”

“Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.”

“Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.”

“I confess, I do not believe in time.”