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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
Boys
Girl
Book
Writing
Identifies
Mind
Conceived
Good
Composed
Admirable
Reader
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
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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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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
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She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
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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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I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.
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The tiny madman in his padded cell.
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I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.
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He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
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There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
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Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
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We are most artistically caged.
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Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
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Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
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A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
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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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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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And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.
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