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No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

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
Chekhov
Pathetic
Emphasis
Author
Characters
Created
Less
Character

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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
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Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be
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Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.
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A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
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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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We think not in words but in shadows of words.
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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.
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Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
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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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The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
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We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
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In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
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There is only one school of literature - that of talent.
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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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.
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By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.
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It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?
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