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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.

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
Book
Great
Hogwash
Writing
Sentimental
Structure
Essence
Style
Ideas

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
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One is always at home in one's past.
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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
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There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
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But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
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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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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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Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
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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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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
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My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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