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I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
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
Times
Outlast
Often
Erasers
Ever
Rewriting
Writing
Revision
Every
Pencils
Published
Several
Word
Rewritten
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
I think it is all a matter of love.
Vladimir Nabokov
Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
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All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
Vladimir Nabokov
Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
Vladimir Nabokov
At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.
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
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
A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
Vladimir Nabokov
A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.
Vladimir Nabokov
We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.
Vladimir Nabokov
My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.
Vladimir Nabokov
In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
Vladimir Nabokov
He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
Vladimir Nabokov
There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.
Vladimir Nabokov
Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
Vladimir Nabokov
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
Vladimir Nabokov
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
Vladimir Nabokov
I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.
Vladimir Nabokov
Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.
Vladimir Nabokov
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
Vladimir Nabokov
