Vladimir Nabokov: Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crow...

I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. ... I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov

husband baby art

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

Vladimir Nabokov

butterfly writing men

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Vladimir Nabokov

genius dream snow

Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.

Vladimir Nabokov

lilith intercourse capable

Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.

Vladimir Nabokov

ornaments possibility events

And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods. . .

Vladimir Nabokov

crowds addresses rainbow

There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.

Vladimir Nabokov

survival book people

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

Vladimir Nabokov

kangaroos cosmos expression

do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation

Vladimir Nabokov

butterfly artist forgotten

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behaviour of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.

Vladimir Nabokov

drawing heart thinking

While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.

Vladimir Nabokov

black doors wind

My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed." "... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here." "There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov

towns bed sometimes

My own ultraviolet darling. " Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

ultraviolet darling my-own

To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.

Vladimir Nabokov

motto following literature

Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

Vladimir Nabokov

adultery rise-above way

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

Vladimir Nabokov

reader sheep writing

IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost. The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold. Herman Melville at breakfast, feeling a sardine to his cat. Poe's wedding. Lewis Carroll's picnics. The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding.

Vladimir Nabokov

alaska cat kings

Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.

Vladimir Nabokov

i-am-so-tired cynical tired

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

Vladimir Nabokov

character past world

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Vladimir Nabokov

fancy murder style

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.