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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

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
Conventional
Rise
Way
Adultery

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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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I think it is all a matter of love.
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My characters are galley slaves.
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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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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 am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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The lost glove is happy.
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…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.
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The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.
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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.
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Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
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I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
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