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Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created it has its fatal flaw.

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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Lost
Grieving
Found
Hoping
Reality
Recently
Dream
Flaws
Thing
Mathematics
Never
Created
Would
Dreams
Flaw
Men
Tomorrow
Fatal

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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.
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I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
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Do not be angry with the rain it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.
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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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Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughed.
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A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
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Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
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Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
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As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me.
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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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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
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