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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

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
Art
Writing
Precision
Poetic
Scientist
Poet
Writer
Imagination

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
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Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
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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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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.
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Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
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A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.
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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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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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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God but was I free?
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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
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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.
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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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If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
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I am sentimental,’ she said. ‘I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.
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Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .
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