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I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.

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
Deny
Reality
Cannot
Right
Something
Disobey

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
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I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
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Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
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You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.
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Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
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Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .
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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.
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Do not be angry with the rain it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
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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
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Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Vladimir Nabokov
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
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Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
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The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
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Although I do not care for the slogan art for art's sake, there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.
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An active and creative reader is a re-reader.
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Words without experience are meaningless.
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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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