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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.

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
Realizing
Venerate
Artist
Russians
Two
Mystic
Much
Russian
Things
Readers
Love
Americans
Reader
Realize

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
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It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.
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Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
Vladimir Nabokov
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There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
Vladimir Nabokov
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All great novels are great fairy tales.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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
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He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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
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Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!
Vladimir Nabokov
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I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
Vladimir Nabokov
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But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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
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When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
Vladimir Nabokov
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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