Vladimir Nabokov

"The essence of consciousness is the flow of time through it."

"Art is the echo of life, distorted through the mirror of the artist's mind."

"Language is a tool, but it is also a prison."

"To be a true reader is to be alive to every nuance of language."

"The only way to deal with the future is to create it."

"Sentimentality is the only sentiment worth having."

"We are all prisoners of our own perception."

"The perfect expression would be that which takes the least amount of time to say the most."

"In the end, we are all defined by the choices we did not make."

"Happiness is the art of never holding grudges."

"A writer's chief concern should be the accuracy of his observation."

"The mind is the only thing that cannot be confined."

"Memory and desire are the two great forces of consciousness."

"We die, we are born, we die again, and in between we create."

"Language shapes thought as much as thought shapes language."

"The most beautiful thing in the world is the precise description of a feeling."

"All novelists are secretly philosophers."

"Time is the greatest gift and the cruelest thief."

"The heart wants what it wants, but the mind must reign supreme."

"Art imitates life, but often life imitates bad art."

"In the secret chambers of the heart, we are all romantics."

"The greatest discoveries come from careful observation of small things."

"A true intellectual is someone who can entertain an idea without accepting it."

"The butterfly is nature's greatest work of art."

"We are all exiles from our own consciousness."

"Style is the art of saying complicated things in simple ways."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

"Life is what we make of the time we have been given."

"An artist must learn to see like a child again."

"The greatest pleasure is in the telling of a story."