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Caress the detail, the divine detail.

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
Spirituality
Details
Chaos
Divine
Religion
Spirit
Caress
Detail
Complexity

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
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Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
Vladimir Nabokov
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You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
Vladimir Nabokov
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When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - hoping that I like the book as much as he does - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.
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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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I think it is all a matter of love.
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I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
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Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
Vladimir Nabokov
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.
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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
Vladimir Nabokov
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When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
Vladimir Nabokov
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…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.
Vladimir Nabokov
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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be
Vladimir Nabokov