Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

It can be a little distressing to have to overintellectualize yourself.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

I have no inner monologue.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

I don't know if I'm very complicated at all. I wish I was. I wish I was one of these deep, intricate people. But I just love having fun really.

Madame Bovary is myself.

The more I get to do this character, the more I realize that she's not just annoying. It's that her strength is not interacting with people socially. She just doesn't have time because she has so much going on in her brain.

It's really about living in your head... just looking out at the world, then going back into your head and tossing around a lot of ideas and coming out with something interesting to say.

Most don't live inside their heads as a writer does, having conversations with her own ideas.

Only the shallow know themselves.

If you start to analyze what you do, it can paralyze you.

I'm big on watching film, and sometimes it hurts myself because I over-calculate things, or I overthink sometimes.

You cannot analyse your personality. It is like trying to understand the essential characteristics of a person.

Every mind is a clutter of memories, images, inventions and age-old repetitions. It can be a ghetto, too, if a ghetto is a sealed-off, confined place. Or a sanctuary, where one is free to dream and think whatever one wants. For most of us it's both - and a lot more complicated.

A 'nidiot' is something different from an idiot. An idiot is someone whose problems are caused by not concentrating enough. A 'nidiot' is someone who makes his life more complicated by thinking too much rather than not enough. I'm not an idiot, but I'm definitely a 'nidiot'!

I'm just a bit of a dreamer, and I get really in my thoughts. I get so deep with myself at times it's almost very scary.

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive knowledge.

You have to look at yourself objectively. Analyze yourself like an instrument. You have to be absolutely frank with yourself. Face your handicaps, don't try to hide them. Instead, develop something else.

The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself.

When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

If I do not understand myself, the whole complexity of myself, I have no basis for thinking.

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

The imagination says listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice. I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril.... The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.