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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

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
Importance
Whatever
Society
Individual
Art
Important
Work

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Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.
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There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.
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You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
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The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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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 was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition
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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a 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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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
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That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.
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Literature was not born the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.
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Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
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... my mind lay limp in an empty world.
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