“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”
More from Vladimir Nabokov on Writing
“The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]”
“Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.”
“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”
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
“The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”