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The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

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
Tone
Characters
Tint
Greater
Resembling
Chance
Talkative
Character
Reincarnation
Writing
Gifted
Mind
Chances
Author

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The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.
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Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
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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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My little cup brims with tiddles.
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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.
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The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
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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.
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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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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: O rainbow-colored gods. . .
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My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
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The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that offensive is frequently but a synonym for unusual and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.
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I don't read reviews about myself with any special eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen, and I never reread them.
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I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
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His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.
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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 masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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The tiny madman in his padded cell.
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