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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.
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
Brain
Discerned
Future
Individually
Past
Seductive
Better
Existed
Something
Balanced
Would
Demands
Demand
Perhaps
Concretely
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At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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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 was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
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Words without experience are meaningless.
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Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
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I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me.
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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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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
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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.
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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
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In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
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Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
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Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
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It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
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