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There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called powerful novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.

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
Called
Variety
Torrents
Powerful
Instance
Dialog
Stories
Historical
Abhor
Also
Touch
Varieties
Never
Mystery
Obscenity
Novel
Detest
Fiction
Commonplace
Full
Novels
Obscenities

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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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Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
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Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round.
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Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.
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Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
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A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
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That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.
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Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
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