Time & Perspective Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s barb lands with the elegance of a rapier: he doesn’t merely dislike bad criticism; he wants to preempt it, to deny it oxygen. “Spare the time and effort” masquerades as courtesy, but the courtesy is weaponized. The joke is that the people he’s allegedly helping are the very ones he’s contemptuously dismissing. In one line he performs the core Nabokov move: turning politeness into an instrument of exclusion.

The target list is telling. “Hack reviewers” aren’t just mediocre; they’re industrial. Hacks don’t read to discover, they read to process, package, and pronounce. Then comes the delicious escalation: “generally, persons who move their lips when reading.” That’s not simply a jab at literacy; it’s a class signal and an aesthetic boundary. Subtext: if you consume literature as mere decoding, if you approach prose like an instruction manual, you’re not in the right room. Nabokov isn’t defending difficulty for its own sake; he’s defending attention. His ideal reader is rereading, noticing pattern, catching misdirection, hearing the music. Lip-movers are the opposite: they’re stuck at the level of mechanics, unable (or unwilling) to graduate into pleasure, irony, and precision.

Contextually, this fits Nabokov’s long-running war against what he saw as philistine, moralizing, plot-summarizing criticism. He distrusted reviewers who treated novels as message-delivery systems or sociological specimens. The line is also a prophylactic against misreading, a preemptive sneer that raises the stakes: interpret me lazily and you’ve proven my point. It’s arrogance, yes, but it’s also a dare - to read with intelligence, and to admit that not every book is written for everyone.