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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

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
Always
Murderer
Prose
Count
Fancy
Murder
Style

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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
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Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
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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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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
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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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Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created it has its fatal flaw.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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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 think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
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... my mind lay limp in an empty world.
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Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
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I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.
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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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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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