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for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

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
Better
Commentator
Commentators
Worse
Word
Lasts
Last

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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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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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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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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I confess, I do not believe in time.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Dear Jesus, do something.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
Vladimir Nabokov
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A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
Vladimir Nabokov
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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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.
Vladimir Nabokov