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Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
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
Inspirational
Give
Flights
Might
Insanity
Giving
Fancy
Think
Flight
Thinking
Meaning
Life
Creativity
Imagination
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
Vladimir Nabokov
Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
Vladimir Nabokov
Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the a.non.y.muse roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
Vladimir Nabokov
There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
Vladimir Nabokov
The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.
Vladimir Nabokov
Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
Vladimir Nabokov
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
Vladimir Nabokov
There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
Vladimir Nabokov
Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
Vladimir Nabokov
if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
Vladimir Nabokov
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov
Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
Vladimir Nabokov
Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.
Vladimir Nabokov
And the rest is rust and stardust.
Vladimir Nabokov
Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
Vladimir Nabokov
A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
Vladimir Nabokov
I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
Vladimir Nabokov
I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
Vladimir Nabokov
All great novels are great fairy tales.
Vladimir Nabokov
