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Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
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
Story
Art
True
Stories
Insult
Truth
Invention
Writing
Fiction
Literature
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More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
Vladimir Nabokov
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.
Vladimir Nabokov
There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
Vladimir Nabokov
Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
Vladimir Nabokov
There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called powerful novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
Vladimir Nabokov
It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
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
I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
Vladimir Nabokov
Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be
Vladimir Nabokov
The square root of I is I.
Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.
Vladimir Nabokov
The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
Vladimir Nabokov
Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
Vladimir Nabokov
A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.
Vladimir Nabokov
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
Vladimir Nabokov
Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.
Vladimir Nabokov
Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
Vladimir Nabokov
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
Vladimir Nabokov
We are most artistically caged.
Vladimir Nabokov
