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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

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
Girl
Book
Writing
Identifies
Mind
Conceived
Good
Composed
Admirable
Reader
Boys

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Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
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The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
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I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane.
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Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
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Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.
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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
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At a very early stage of the novel's development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.
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Memory overshadows the present and dims the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup.
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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.
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And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
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…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.
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I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
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Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
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But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
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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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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
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