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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Vladimir Nabokov
Age: 77 †
Born: 1899
Born: January 1
Died: 1977
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Chess Composer
Chess Player
Journalist
Lepidopterist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
St. Petersburg
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vladimir Sirin
Vl. Sirin
Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin
V. Sirin
World
Slippery
Loathe
Baths
Mediocrity
Group
Hairy
Activity
Multiplication
Groups
Communal
Nothing
Bath

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I should allow only my heart to have imagination and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
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And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: O rainbow-colored gods. . .
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
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To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
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There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
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There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called powerful novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
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My Carmen, I said (I used to call her that sometimes) we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed. ... Because, really, I continued, there is no point in staying here. There is no point in staying anywhere, said Lolita.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
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Caress the detail, the divine detail.
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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
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