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One is always at home in one's past.

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
Past
Home
Always

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No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
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If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.
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Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.
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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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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
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My characters are galley slaves.
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I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.
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At a very early stage of the novel's development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.
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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.
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Curiously enough, one cannot read a book one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
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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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...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
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I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
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