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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

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
Game
Games
Parody
Satire
Lesson
Lessons

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition
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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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
Vladimir Nabokov
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... my mind lay limp in an empty world.
Vladimir Nabokov
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My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
Vladimir Nabokov
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
Vladimir Nabokov
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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
Vladimir Nabokov