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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

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
Crime
Stupid
Simple
Music
Loathing
Soft
Oppression
Cruelty
Stupidity

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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
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I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
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We are most artistically caged.
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Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
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Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
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And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
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It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.
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Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
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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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Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.
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