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The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that offensive is frequently but a synonym for unusual and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.

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
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Repeating
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Namely
May
Thus
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Excused
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More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
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Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
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All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.
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And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
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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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Some people, and I am one of them, hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm.
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Literature was not born the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.
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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.
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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
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I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
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...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
Vladimir Nabokov
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
Vladimir Nabokov
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in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
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My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita
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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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Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
Vladimir Nabokov