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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

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
Perilous
Revelation
Revelations
Revolution

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Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
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There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
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I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
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Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.
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How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
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If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subdued, frightened-to-death rocking chair, before I drove to wherever the beast's lair was - and then pulled the pistol's foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger.
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Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
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I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
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To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
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While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.
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Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
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