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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
Disobey
Deny
Reality
Cannot
Right
Something
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.
Vladimir Nabokov
We think not in words but in shadows of words.
Vladimir Nabokov
And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
Vladimir Nabokov
Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
Vladimir Nabokov
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
Vladimir Nabokov
Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!
Vladimir Nabokov
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
Vladimir Nabokov
To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
Vladimir Nabokov
The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.
Vladimir Nabokov
I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
Vladimir Nabokov
Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
Vladimir Nabokov
In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
Vladimir Nabokov
...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.
Vladimir Nabokov
The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious it has been set free.
Vladimir Nabokov
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
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov
I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
Vladimir Nabokov
Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Vladimir Nabokov