Vladimir Nabokov

"Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth."

"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."

"Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name."

"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual."

"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

"Light in comparison with darkness is a void."

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."

"I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else."

"Let all of life be an unfettered howl."

"while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."

"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"

"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."

"I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes"

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

"Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely."