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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

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
Everything
Feels
Time
Sees
Scientist
Poet
Space
Point
Happens

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Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.
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I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
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A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
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I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
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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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in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
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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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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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Measure me while I live - after it will be too late.
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Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.
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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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Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
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I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
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In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
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Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
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