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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.

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
Work
Importance
Safe
Fiction
Question
Slogan
Social
Rust
Makes
Slogans
Art
Although
Care
Sake

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
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If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
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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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Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
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My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.
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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
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All religions are based on obsolete terminology.
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I should allow only my heart to have imagination and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.
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There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book great ideas are hogwash.
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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
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How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
Vladimir Nabokov
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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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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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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.
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A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.
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As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.
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There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
Vladimir Nabokov