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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
Parody
Satire
Lesson
Lessons
Game
Games

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.
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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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
Vladimir Nabokov
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Vladimir Nabokov
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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
Vladimir Nabokov
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
Vladimir Nabokov
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And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
Vladimir Nabokov
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What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
Vladimir Nabokov
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
Vladimir Nabokov