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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
Literature
Call
Story
Art
True
Stories
Insult
Truth
Invention
Writing
Fiction
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.
Vladimir Nabokov
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
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
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
His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.
Vladimir Nabokov
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
Vladimir Nabokov
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
I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with.
Vladimir Nabokov
Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
Vladimir Nabokov
There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.
Vladimir Nabokov
When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - hoping that I like the book as much as he does - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.
Vladimir Nabokov
I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.
Vladimir Nabokov
I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
Vladimir Nabokov
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
Vladimir Nabokov
In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
Vladimir Nabokov
And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy...What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me-my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift...I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing-yes, really absorbing! ... I am happy-yes, happy!
Vladimir Nabokov
I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
Vladimir Nabokov
My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.
Vladimir Nabokov
a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
Vladimir Nabokov
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Vladimir Nabokov
