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To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

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
Safe
Magic
Brute
Type
Brutes
Accepting
Trash
Art
Triumph
Power
Prefer
Play
Safety
Accept

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I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
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And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.
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A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
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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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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
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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.
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in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
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do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation
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