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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
Two
Mystic
Much
Russian
Things
Readers
Love
Americans
Reader
Realize
Realizing
Venerate
Artist
Russians
More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
My characters are galley slaves.
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It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
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He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
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Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.
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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
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Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
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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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Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
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Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
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Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
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I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
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if a violin string could ache, i would be that string.
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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.
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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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Do those clowns really believe what they teach?
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Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.
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The square root of I is I.
Vladimir Nabokov
