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When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - hoping that I like the book as much as he does - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.

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
Novel
Sustained
Doe
Publishers
Firsts
Hoping
Book
Hopeful
Dialog
Looks
Check
Publisher
First
Checks
Abundant
Much
Shut
Bang
Like
Receive
Bangs

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
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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.
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Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple.
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Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.
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Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.
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Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.
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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.
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Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
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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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Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
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Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the a.non.y.muse roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
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Genius is finding the invisible link between things.
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I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.
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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.
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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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And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
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Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
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The commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that offensive is frequently but a synonym for unusual and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.
Vladimir Nabokov