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The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

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
Back
Express
Writing
Worse
Like
Thoughts
Becomes
Excise
Grows
Cancerous
Written
Tumor
Less
Tumors
Thought
Oppressive

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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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.
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And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
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Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
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Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.
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Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.
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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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You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.
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Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?
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Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
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A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
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We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble there shall Jane's heart always break.
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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.
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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
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The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
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I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.
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