There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann. Vladimir Nabokov
Some Similar Quotes
  1. No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves it is the woman only who can make it a torment. - Jane Austen

  2. Language is the key to the heart of people. - Ahmed Deedat

  3. After all, tomorrow is another day! - Margaret Mitchell

  4. That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them! - Connie Willis

  5. Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly. - Matthew Quick

More Quotes By Vladimir Nabokov
  1. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

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

  3. I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her —after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred— I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness...

  4. Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

  5. Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

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