Quote

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

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
Something
Neither
Neurotics
College
Blockheads
Teacher
Cocky
Class
Discuss
Means
Letting
Two
Discussion
Young
Twenty
Mean
Twenties

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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
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Dear Jesus, do something.
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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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All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.
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His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.
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I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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One is always at home in one's past.
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Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.
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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.
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Do not be angry with the rain it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
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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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I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
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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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