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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.

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
Love
Among
Novelists
Manages
Like
Fiction
Received
Bullet
Quite
Actual
Embedded
Within
Manage
Novelist
Happy
Secure
Bullets
Lives
Flesh
Letter
Young
Letters
Preserve
Flabby
Work
Clean
Preserves
Spurious

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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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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It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
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I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
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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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It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
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Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
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Genius is finding the invisible link between things.
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
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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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There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.
Vladimir Nabokov
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As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.
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Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
Vladimir Nabokov